While Facebook Live might be getting good numbers (and increasingly bad press), it's worth noting YouTube has quietly offered live streaming for ages.

And it's going gangbusters. Largely thanks to a baby giraffe.

Live to Air

In February this year the Animal Adventure Park in New York starting live streaming the pregnancy of resident giraffe April. 

April and her unborn bub soon went viral. One super fan created an app that crowdsourced pregnancy updates from tens of thousands of fans, and on the much-anticipated day April giving birth became the second most live streamed video on YouTube. Ever.

Rubber necking

Here are the stats: 232 million live views, and 7.6 billion minutes of live watched in total.

The average time watching the stream was more than 30 minutes, for an average of 3.5 million views per day.

The buzz saw Animal Adventure Park became the fifth fastest channel to reach 200 million views, after a mere 54 days. It's also one of just seven channels to pass 100 million live views.

And in case you were wondering, April gave birth to a healthy male calf.

Takeways

While not all of us sadly do not have access to a pregnant giraffe in our marketing bag of tricks, the stunning rise of April's live stream shows the potential power of live streaming for brands.

If you use live streaming, what's your platform of choice? Let us know in the Comments.