Dive Brief:

• With 440,000 subscribers on its YouTube page, Chanel has lapped its competition – and that's not counting other KPIs (key performance indicator) such as views.
• For comparison, luxury competitors Christian Dior and Burberry each count 210,000 and 189,000 subscribers respectively.
• Further, data from YouTube marketing firm Pixability’s June 2015 Beauty on YouTube study, found 65% of beauty videos on the platform are either commercials or tutorials. Chanel, which was counted as a beauty brand alongside other "multi-market" companies in the study, typically pushes out content that falls under one or both of those categories, Digiday points out.

Dive Insight:

Paris-based luxury label Chanel has long set the standard among its competitors, and it is moving into the digital age as a trend-setter on YouTube. It may come as a surprise, but Chanel has made a home for itself on the Google-owned video platform, amassing some 444,000 followers and millions of views.

As Digiday puts it, "For a luxury fashion house like Chanel, being on YouTube seems like slumming it. The luxury brand, however, has one of the most successful industry channels on the platform."

Chanel's most-viewed video, an ad for its storied perfume Chanel No. 5 featuring vintage footage of Marilyn Monroe, has nearly 13 million views. As recent Pixability research shows, the engagement levels on Chanel's more than 300 video uploads shows its strategy of creating a digital window into the brand is working. The Parisian fashion house was the most viewed and engaged channel in its category, according to Pixability, with 168 million views and 6.6 million engagements between January 2014 and April 2015.

Of course, simply uploading content doesn't necessitate engagement, as the recent L2 Video 2015 study demonstrated. However, Mabel McLean, research analyst at L2 and the Video 2015 study lead, told Digiday that the quality of Chanel's content blows all other high-fashion brands out of the water with the sheer number of videos it’s posting."

“One runway show will turn out eight YouTube videos – an interview with Karl [Lagerfeld], celebrity attendants and the runway designs themselves. That’s a great way to up view count," McLean added.

For fashion and beauty publishers and marketers, the rosy news serves to reaffirm the success they have seen so far on social media.