The Creator Community Driving Yamaha Forward (HBBIP #50)

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I couldn’t figure out what I should talk about in this week’s blog post. Which brand profile would you enjoy the most: a world-famous musical instrument company, a leading audio equipment manufacturer, or a beloved motorcycle and motor vehicle producer?

Since I can’t bear to disappoint my audience, I decided to compromise and write about Yamaha.

Alright, you probably saw that joke coming a mile away. But riddle me this: which division within Yamaha garners the most buzz online? How does a brand with so many far-flung departments unify its promotional efforts? And how has Yamaha, which I’m pretty sure is the oldest brand I’ve ever written about (founded in 1887!), adapted to the new world of the creator economy?

Read on to find out, because the answers to these questions are absolutely speeding toward you—one in particular.

Yamaha’s Community: A Closer Look

Motorcycles. It’s motorcycles. When people online talk about Yamaha, they’re talking about Yamaha motorcycles. Apologies to all the saxophonists and audiophiles out there—your day in the sun will surely come. But for now, it’s a biker’s world out there, and we’re just living in it.

I’ll get to exactly why that’s the case in a moment, but for now, having set the stage, I want to start somewhere these analyses don’t typically begin: with community size.

Check out this graph of Yamaha’s U.S. creator community from January 2018 to December 2023:

Yamaha Community Size: 2018 - 2023

Solid growth, with the brand’s community more than doubling in five years—a lot to be proud of. But the key to community size growth is understanding that it’s an exponential metric. When a brand’s community expands by even just a small margin, it leads to greater momentum across other metrics. After all, more creators (usually) means more posts:

Yamaha Content Volume: 2018 - 2023 

Notice that Yamaha improved by an even more dramatic degree in content volume. And this pattern—small steps from 2018 to 2021, followed by a pair of big leaps in 2022 and 2023—was in turn mirrored by the brand’s Earned Media Value:

Yamaha EMV: 2018 - 2023 

Looks familiar, no? Here we can see how closely EMV tracks to community size.

But what does this community look like? Who’s talking about Yamaha? And why was I so adamant earlier that out of all Yamaha’s many products, it’s motorcycles powering the brand’s digital momentum?

Enter MasFace

To answer all of these questions, I’d like to introduce Mason Risser, aka MasFace6.

A motorcyclist and content creator, MasFace boasts a whopping 3.4M followers on YouTube, alongside a less whopping 2.1M followers on TikTok, and a thoroughly unwhopworthy 415.2k followers on Instagram. (Kidding—I for one would still be whopped by 415.2k followers on any platform.)

MasFace has declared himself “Arizona’s favorite motovlogger, and I’m certainly not going to argue with him, given how eagerly his community consumes his content, especially his YouTube Shorts about all things #BikeLife.

As if the whole Grand Canyon State wasn’t enough for this guy, MasFace made a credible case to be Yamaha’s favorite motovlogger too, if not the company’s favorite person in existence. Why? 

Well folks, if you’ll recall Luc Belaire, an alcohol brand whose digital presence was almost entirely dependent on the posting activity of one William Leonard Roberts II, history repeats itself: we’ve got another Rick Ross situation on our hands.

Top 10 EMV-drivers from August 2023 - July 2024

From August 2023 to July 2024, MasFace mentioned Yamaha in 578 posts, revving up $35.2M EMV. That’s not only a cool 4x the total of Yamaha’s second-place finisher, motorcycle TikToker All Luck Angel (@allluckangel)—it’s 43% of the brand’s EMV total during those 12 months.

So okay, it’s not quite another Rick Ross situation—he drove more than 90% of Luc Belaire’s EMV—but still, it’s about as close as any brand is likely to get.

What’s more, MasFace only started tagging his posts with his signature message, mentioning his favorite Yamaha FZ-07, in November 2023. That means that the creator was largely responsible for the brand’s sustained momentum into 2024: from January to July, Yamaha accrued $81.3M EMV—a 165% YoY surge versus the same seven months in 2023, and an improvement upon the brand’s whole-year 2023 haul of $65.2M EMV.

And we do know that it’s mostly MasFace who’s fueling these gains. From August 2023 to July 2024, the creator was responsible for:

• Yamaha’s top seven EMV-driving posts.
• Fourteen of Yamaha’s top 15 EMV-driving posts.
• Forty-six of Yamaha’s top 50 EMV-driving posts.
• Eighty-two of Yamaha’s top 100 EMV-driving posts.

In other words, this guy isn’t posting a ton of low-hanging fruit and racking up volume stats—he’s front and center, setting the pace for online discourse about Yamaha.

The Power of YouTube

Still, it takes a village to spark so much digital hype for Yamaha. MasFace’s rise is part and parcel of a broader surge in motorcycle-focused content creators, as seen from the other creators within Yamaha’s top 10 EMV-drivers. Like MasFace, most of these creators are primarily active on YouTube, and the platform has been largely responsible for supercharging Yamaha’s social media presence.

You wouldn’t necessarily predict that YouTube would be source of this growth if you just looked at platform EMV, where Instagram still has an edge:

Yamaha EMV by Platform

Yes, YouTube is growing fast, but Instagram still contributes a plurality of the brand’s EMV. However, this is no longer the case when you look at engagement…

Yamaha Engagement by Platform

Or Impressions…

Yamaha Impressions by Platform

With YouTube generating a vast majority of Yamaha’s totals in these metrics, and boasting pretty spectacular four-digit growth, it’s clear that Yamaha has found a seamless union between product, market, and platform. MasFace and his friends are pushing the brand to new heights, demonstrating the tremendous viral potential of the motor vehicles space at large.

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