Tube Trends: 2025 World Series Goes Global On YouTube

Nov 6

This year’s World Series was a truly international affair. Between the Canada vs. United States matchup with the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers, and the numerous Japanese stars on the Dodgers, it was easier than normal to generate interest beyond U.S. borders.

Data from Tubular Labs shows the extent of international viewership on YouTube, where United States videos about the World Series accounted for 60.3% of views from Oct. 21-Nov. 2. Meanwhile, 15.5% of views came watching videos from Japanese creators, and 6.7% were from Canadian creators.

The breakdown is even more international when limited to individual creators. Japanese creator videos accounted for 22.7% of user-generated content around the World Series, versus 43.0% for U.S. videos. But notably, the Japanese uploads were averaging nearly 55K views per upload (compared to 23.0K for domestic creator uploads).

Baseball being popular among Japanese audiences is not a new phenomenon, yet it’s one that has shown some impressive growth in recent years — especially as a growing number of Japanese stars have joined the Dodgers, in particular. Along with reigning National League MVP Shohei Ohtani, L.A.. also boasts newly-minted World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto and closer Roki Sasaki.

Assembling that level of talent from Japan has helped fuel impressive audiences for Major League Baseball all season in the country. Japan also averaged a reported 9.7 million TV viewers per game during the World Series, with an 11-inning seventh game averaging 12 million. It’s also led to major revenue increases.

Last season, MLB stated that Japanese sponsorship revenue grew 114% year-over-year while merchandise sales ballooned by 183%. And that was before Fanatics announced it made $40 million from this year’s Tokyo Series, Ohtani put together another MVP campaign and three of the most popular teams in Japan — The Dodgers, Cubs and Mariners — all won at least one playoff round. After all of that, the 2025 numbers may truly be staggering.

YouTube is poised to continue to play a role in helping fuel the continued popularity and revenue increases abroad, too.

During the World Series, nearly half of YouTube’s top 25 creators (by views) were based outside of the country. Japan had the had the most there, at three. But Canada, Mexico, Thailand, Taiwan and South Korea were all represented as well. And while many of the U.S. accounts were either media, MLB itself or the Dodgers, the Japanese pages appeared unaffiliated with the league at all.

In an era when even the NFL is interested in investing more in creator relationships in order to grow its appeal with younger generations and find new ways to package games, MLB could take a similar approach with some of the more prolific international creators. Even acknowledging audience behavior differences from country to country, some facts remain the same: Primarily that social video is crucial to reach viewers, and localization can pay huge dividends.

With the World Baseball Classic on the horizon next spring, there’s never been a bigger moment for MLB to elevate its international strategy… with social video at the center.