Lately, as part of our 50 VOD Professionals survey I've been doing some research into the most influential people working in the UK new television sector. Finding candidates from broadcasters, brands and content aggregators was fairly straightforward but what about publishers and, in particular the British press? How do they use video to engage online audiences? What does social media tell us about how people interact with newspapers and are there any individuals from the industry that deserve to make the 50 VOD Professionals shortlist?

Here's some data, comments and names to watch:

#1. The Daily Telegraph is the biggest UK newspaper on YouTube

With just under 95 million video views on YouTube, the Telegraph outguns its rivals by a factor of three on the site. The next nearest newspaper is The Sun - 29.4 million views - followed by the Mirror, the Times and the Independent. With only 15,616 video views and six subscribers, the Express is the worst-performing daily newspaper on YouTube. The Guardian and Daily Mail both have some really interesting stats which we'll come to presently (see #4 below). Note: James Weeks is the Telegraph's Head of Video.

#2. The Telegraph team is fully engaged with YouTube

And by that I mean that the Telegraph has been active on YouTube since November 2006 and has uploaded more videos to the site than any other paper - 5,613 in total. The Guardian and the Mirror have both uploaded just over 2,000 videos (joining YouTube in February and October 2006 respectively). Again the Express is bottom of the list with just five videos on YouTube since September 2009. Note: Lori Cunningham is the Telegraph's Future Strategy Director.

#3. The Times posts the most popular videos

Although The Times has only posted 268 videos on YouTube since June 2007 each video is viewed, on average, 71,805 times. That's pretty impressive particularly as its nearest competitor is the Daily Star with an average 33,300 views per video. It's a bit of a leap but if the Times engaged with YouTube as much as the Telegraph - and the average views per video remained constant - it would become easily the biggest UK newspaper on the site with 403 million views. Compare that with its current 19 million video views and the Times has a real opportunity to make significant new revenues and broaden its customer relationship marketing database.

#4. The Guardian & Daily Mail too have opportunities

The Mail and the Guardian are, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the two most-read daily newspapers online with a whopping 5.4 million and 3.7 million average daily browsers. On YouTube however, both publications appear in the bottom half of the most video views list: 14.1m for the Guardian and just 452,000 for the Mail. Could greater YouTube activity drive even more readers? Interestingly, the Guardian has the second-greatest Twitter following (420,566 followers as at 28 May 2012) and the second-highest Facebook 'likes' (381,767 on the same date). By comparison, The Mail fares relatively poorly with 84,000 Twitter followers and 25,000 Facebook 'likes'. Note: Stephen Folwell is the Guardian's Director of Business Development and Brand Extensions.

#5. The Financial Times is the leader on Twitter

The FT is by far the biggest British daily paper on Twitter with 722,000+ followers. Only the Guardian comes anywhere close to it. The Telegraph, which does so well on YouTube, has only 114,000 followers even though it has posted more tweets than any other paper (148,000). Once again the Express has the fewest number of followers with just over 12,000.

The FT also leads the way in posting popular content on the social network. It gains 100 new followers with every 3.12 tweets it publishes. The Telegraph has to tweet 130 times, The Times 186 times and the Express 528 times to achieve the same metric.

#6. Facebook users like The Sun

It's The Sun wot won this category with almost 472,000 Facebook 'likes' compared to the Guardian's 382,000 and the Financial Times' 325,000 'likes'. For once the Express isn't the bridesmaid even though it only has 13,000 'likes' - the Daily Star has just 8,400.

Last October Facebook upgraded its service to include a new "talking about this" feature whose goal is to track conversion rates around specific interactions and pages over the past 7 days. It includes things like posting to a page's wall, liking, sharing or commenting on a post and checking in to a page.

Using this measure, the Sun also has the most-engaged Facebook audience - approximately 7.6% of its users participate in some on-site activity. The Daily Mail is next with 6.81% followed by the Daily Express (4.97%). Guardian readers are the third least-active on Facebook. 

Feel free to download the source spreadsheet I created to write this article. It contains all the data and graphs shown here ready for you to play with. Note: You'll need to register or login to access it.