It’s more than just videos of cats playing the piano or Auto-Tuned oddballs from the local news.

YouTube has become “the powerhouse platform for video,” including automotive content, says video advertising technology firm Pixability.

The company’s Get Behind the Wheel: Auto in the Premium Video Ecosystem study released Monday said that auto-related YouTube content generated 2 billion monthly views in 2015 and that annual views climbed 42 percent between 2014 and 2015.

For much of the late 2000s and in the early portion of this decade, monthly views of auto content averaged 500,000 or fewer, though slowly but surely rising. It eventually eclipsed the 2 billion monthly view mark. 

The Pixability study also says that there has been stronger interest in searching for the term “car review” on YouTube over the past five years than on Google.com.  

“This means today’s consumers are turning to online video to shape their brand preferences, and ultimately making brand decisions on YouTube,” Pixability said in the study.

(It should be noted that Google, of course, purchased YouTube in 2006).

On Friday, Auto Remarketing caught up with Eric Linder, digital strategist with Pixability, to discuss the study’s findings in more detail, beginning with the aforementioned search surge for YouTube.

Linder said that YouTube has “matured as a platform” and its content has evolved, and so now, “the user experience brings so much to the table.”

He says that it’s only been in the last three to five years that YouTube has had the same purchase-influencing content that Google has had for the last 10.

In terms of the automotive content on YouTube, the two categories with the greatest share of content are reviews (20 percent) and commercials (18 percent).

“What’s really fascinating about this space,” Linder said, “(is that) I work on studies of this type where we look at many different verticals from this level, and auto is the only vertical we’ve ever looked at where the brands actually own the conversation from both the views and engagement perspectives, in terms of what content gets the most types of views and the most views per published post.

“Brands really own the conversation on YouTube; usually, it's creators,” he said, referring to two of three categories of top auto content producers on YouTube: brands, publishers and creators.  The brands category would include automakers and major dealer groups. 

It gives automakers the opportunity to take a cue from what their peers have done and develop engaging content, Linder said. That might be in the form of commercials on YouTube, he said, or even investing in “more detailed” and “online-specific” content that might be off the beaten path, such as a review or a short film.

“But that also translates to opportunity at the dealer level or the local level. These dealers, just like the national automakers, can go on and post content. They can do walk-arounds, they can do reviews. It can be for new cars or used cars, maybe specialty custom models that the dealers are building,” he said. “The audience is there and they’re ready to consume that content, even if it is branded.

“So, there is a lot of opportunity for everyone to join the conversation.”