Why MikesCarInfo Belongs on Your YouTube Placement List
Somebody starts thinking about replacing their vehicle in March and doesn't sign anything until September. That's the normal version. In between there are evenings on the couch working through four models they're considering, then the trims inside the two that survived, then the question of whether the technology package earns its money. They watch a review, come back a few weeks later for the night version, check a competitor, and turn up again after delivery trying to figure out the menu system.
That's who ends up on my channel. A person spending fifty thousand dollars gives the decision months, and my library is where a lot of those months get spent. Your ad doesn't get one shot at them. It gets the whole consideration window.
The dealer lot gives that person twenty minutes with a salesperson standing there. A pile of thirty-second clips gives them a fragmented picture and takes longer to assemble than they expect. What I'm offering is the time with the vehicle that neither one provides, in daylight and after dark. That's why they stay, and staying is what makes the inventory worth buying.
What the channel is
I sold cars at a dealership before I started filming them, so I know what those twenty minutes on the lot cover and what they skip. I started MikesCarInfo in March 2013. There are about 1,800 videos in it now.
I show the things that annoy you in month four. Where the USB ports are and whether you can reach one from the driver's seat. Whether the second row folds flat or almost flat. What the cargo area looks like when the only light back there is a single bulb in the corner. I go through the key fob, the menu structure, the driver-assist settings, the camera views, and the seat controls, at a pace that lets a person actually follow it.
A large part of the catalog is shot at night, because a vehicle changes after dark and almost nobody's dealership visit happens then. Headlights on a two-lane road. Interior lighting. Screen brightness at eleven at night. What the backup camera does in a dark driveway. My AT NIGHT review of the 2025 VW Golf R has 49,000 views. The daytime review of the same car has 18,400. That gap tells you what people are short on.
The inventory
From YouTube Studio, trailing 28 days ending August 21, 2026:
| Subscribers (lifetime) | 263,400 |
| Videos published (lifetime) | ~1,800 |
| Unique viewers | 514,400 |
| Views | 764,100 |
| Watch time | 59,700 hours |
| Impressions | 6.47 million |
| Impressions CTR | 6.81% |
| Returning viewers | 25.6% |
Watch time is the number that matters most for an in-stream buy. 59,700 hours in four weeks works out to about 2,130 hours a day, or roughly 6.8 years of human attention compressed into a single month.
It also isn't riding on a handful of hits. My ten biggest videos account for 11.3 percent of that watch time and my hundred biggest account for 42.4 percent. Nearly a fifth comes from videos outside my top 500 entirely. A placement here buys a library, and one bad month for one video doesn't move it.
The long-form question
Channel-wide average view duration reads 4:46. If you're evaluating a channel that claims people sit through 30-minute reviews, that number should stop you, so let me break it apart, because it's an average across 1:56 key fob clips and 90-minute reviews sitting in the same library.
In that same 28-day window:
- 68.2 percent of my watch time came from videos 20 minutes or longer
- 42.9 percent came from videos 30 minutes or longer
- 5.4 percent came from videos under 5 minutes
The short utility videos pull large view counts and drag the channel average down. They contribute almost none of the actual watch time. Two thirds of the attention on this channel happens inside long-form sessions.
Here's what that looks like on one video. My 2021 Ford F-150 Platinum PowerBoost review runs 1 hour 32 minutes. Since it published:
| Watch time | 258,400 hours |
| Average view duration | 30:22 |
| Unique viewers | 363,800 |
Thirty minutes and twenty-two seconds, on a ninety-two minute video, sustained over five years.
That's my strongest performer rather than my typical one, and I'd rather label it that way than have you find out later. The production process behind it is the same one I use across the catalog, and it's the reason mid-rolls are enabled on the long reviews. A session like that carries a full pod's worth of environment around every impression.
It's a television audience
On that same review, lifetime watch time by device:
| TV | 69.3% |
| Mobile phone | 14.3% |
| Computer | 10.8% |
| Tablet | 5.3% |
Seven in ten hours on a living room screen. That's my own analytics rather than a platform trend piece. If you're buying CTV and want automotive adjacency with an actual shopping audience behind it, this is a television program that happens to sit on YouTube, and it's already being watched that way.
Second-screen behavior comes free with it. Somebody watching a 92-minute walkthrough on the TV has a phone in their hand, which is close to the ideal setup for an advertiser who wants a person to look something up.
They aren't fans, they're shoppers
514,400 people watched in 28 days against 263,400 lifetime subscribers, so most of the monthly audience arrives through search and suggested video. On the F-150 review, 96 percent of lifetime watch time came from people who weren't subscribed.
That's the distinction I'd want you to hold onto. This isn't a fan base showing up for a personality. It's people typing a vehicle name into a search box because they're somewhere inside a purchase they've been working on for months, finding a 90-minute answer, and watching a third of it.
What they leave in the comments matches. One viewer said the review was the reason he was buying a Platinum. Another, in his sixties and on his umpteenth Ford truck, said it helped him settle on a Limited and pull the trigger. A third had been waiting seven months on a chip-shortage backorder and used the video to learn the truck before it showed up. There are plenty of the other kind too, people asking whether the PowerBoost holds up long-term, or whether a used one is worth it. All of it is purchase research, out loud, with dates on it.
The catalog keeps serving
A TV spot stops the day the buy ends. Ad inventory on an evergreen automotive library keeps serving for years, because the videos keep surfacing in YouTube search, Google search, and suggested video long after publication.
Of my watch time in the last 28 days, 87 percent came from videos published more than 90 days earlier. Half came from videos more than a year old. Twenty-nine percent came from videos over three years old. The F-150 review published in May 2021 and is still accumulating hours today.
For a placement buy that matters practically. A campaign flighted against this channel isn't competing for a narrow window of new-upload traffic. Volume is available steadily rather than in spikes, and video-level targeting lets you sit on a specific vehicle for as long as people are shopping it.
Returning viewers were 25.6 percent in the last 28 days, which is the shopper from the opening page coming back across those months. That's frequency built into how people actually research a vehicle, spread over a consideration window rather than stacked into one afternoon. It also means a campaign running here reaches the same person at three or four different stages of narrowing down, which is worth more than three impressions in a day against someone who has already decided.
Who your ad reaches
Google estimates 91 percent of the audience is 25 or older and 69.9 percent is 35 or older. It's heavily male at 84.6 percent. On household income, 34.4 percent are estimated to be in the top 10 percent, 57.5 percent in the top 20, and 74.5 percent in the top 30. Only 7.5 percent fall in the lower half.
Geography runs 54.4 percent United States, 7.4 Canada, 3.2 United Kingdom, 2.3 Mexico, and 1.6 Australia. If you're buying US-only, plan on roughly half the inventory being eligible.
YouTube rates Vehicle Buying Preferences as Very High. Shopping interest comes back Very High across all five motor vehicle price bands, from the $15,000-to-$25,000 tier through $75,000 and above. Avid Investors, Frequently Dines Out, Beachbound Travelers, and Do-It-Yourselfers all come back High.
These are Google's estimates and they carry the usual limits of estimated data. I'd treat them as direction rather than as a census. The direction is consistent enough across five separate categories that I'm comfortable putting them in front of you.
Brand safety and adjacency
Placement buys live or die on what your ad sits next to, so here's what mine sits next to.
The content is vehicles, at a steady pace, with no politics, no controversy, no profanity, and no manufactured outrage. YouTube classifies the channel under Lifestyle and Vehicle. It's the same person on camera every time and has been since 2013. There's no comment section drama to inherit and no back catalog surprise waiting for someone in your brand safety review.
That consistency is worth something specific to a media buyer. Most placement lists get built by exclusion, and most of the work is finding out what a channel does on its bad days. This one doesn't have a category of bad days. Everything in the library is a walkthrough of a vehicle or an answer to an ownership question.
How to buy it
Placement targeting in Google Ads Video campaigns lets you add specific YouTube channels or specific YouTube videos to an ad group. Two practical notes:
Placement, keyword, and topic targeting are unavailable in the Drive Conversions video subtype. If you want this channel specifically, build the campaign without goal guidance or use the Video Views subtype.
Google Ads also requires a minimum of ten channels or videos before it will save a placement ad group. I can send you a curated list of individual video URLs, weighted toward the long reviews and grouped by segment, which covers that minimum on its own and lets you sit on the vehicles that match your product. If you want the long-session inventory specifically, ask for that list instead of adding the channel, because the channel includes the short utility videos.
Skippable in-stream, non-skippable, bumper, and in-feed all run here. Mid-rolls are enabled on the long reviews. Given the device split, device targeting is worth a look.
The ask
Add MikesCarInfo to your placement list and run a test flight. If it earns its keep, keep it. If it doesn't, tell me what the placement report showed and I'll tell you honestly whether the audience was ever going to be a fit, because I'd rather lose one campaign than be the channel that wasted your quarter.
Mike Durland, MikesCarInfo mikes.car.info@gmail.com
Channel figures from YouTube Studio, trailing 28 days ending August 21, 2026. Video-level figures are lifetime since publication. Audience interest, income, and demographic estimates are Google's.
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