€1.34 a Comment and an Empty CPM Cell: YouTube Long-Form Tops Italy's August Value Book

One row on Italy's August value board tops every deep-engagement column, and it is not a Meta placement. YouTube long-form prices a comment at €1.34, a share at €2.51, and a save at €1.00 [1][2]. Those are the column maxima. The best Meta can do against them is a flat €0.80 comment, €1.50 share, and €0.60 save, repeated across Facebook stories, Facebook carousels, Facebook reels, and Instagram carousels [2]. And the CPM cell on the YouTube long-form row is empty [1].

Look at this row before you look anywhere else this month:

The two lines it does not own tell their own story. Instagram reels owns reactions, and the carousels own per-view value, which reads as carousel attention being priced as scarce and deliberate. Everything in between belongs to YouTube long-form.

The money event flips by platform

On Instagram reels, a reaction is worth €1.08 and a comment €0.60: a like prices at 1.8x a comment [2]. On YouTube long-form, a comment is worth €1.34 and a reaction €0.17: a comment prices at eight times a like [1][2]. Same book, same market, same month. The event your creative should be farming inverts completely between the two platforms, and most cross-channel dashboards never surface it because they report one blended engagement rate that flattens this entire structure into a single decimal.

It is duration, not platform

Before you credit YouTube as a platform, check the shorts row. YouTube shorts prices a comment at €0.53, a share at €1.00, a save at €0.40, and a reaction at €0.067 [1][2]. That is below every Facebook line on the board. The premium is not a platform premium; it is a long-form premium. And it is mechanical: , to the fourth decimal (0.167 over 0.0668, 1.336 over 0.5344, 2.505 over 1.002, 1.002 over 0.4008, 0.01336 over 0.005344) [1][2].

The richest lines are the unpriced ones

Only four rows on the board carry a CPM at all: Instagram reels at €3.36, Facebook carousel at €2.76, Instagram carousel at €2.48, and Facebook reels at €1.27 [1]. All Meta. The two YouTube rows, both TikTok rows, and the stories formats carry no cost column. The book's richest engagement therefore sits precisely where the board cannot compute cost per value euro. Any value-ROI ranking built from this drop is a Meta-only metric wearing a market-wide costume. YouTube long-form may be the best buy in Italy or the worst; the board is structurally silent on it.

For contrast, inside the priced set: Facebook reels carries the same €0.80 comment, €1.50 share, and €0.60 save lines as Facebook carousel, at less than half the CPM (€1.27 vs €2.76) [1][2]. That is the cheapest fully-priced deep-event buy on the board, and it is only visible because both cells exist for that row.

Monday morning

1. Report YouTube long-form on deep events, not views. The view line (€0.0134) is a rounding-error tie with Instagram reels (€0.0133) while comments run 2.2x [1][2]. Per-view reporting hides the entire premium.
2. Do not port Meta creative KPIs to YouTube. Brief long-form for comments, saves, and shares; brief reels for reactions. The same asset has two different money events depending on where it runs.
3. Compute cost per value only where both cells exist. For YouTube, join your own spend data before ranking it against Meta rows, and label the ranking as your own join, not the book's verdict.
4. Watch the 2.5. If a future drop moves the long-form-to-shorts ratio off exactly 2.5, that is a repricing event, not noise, and it deserves a paragraph in your next review.

The kicker: the most expensive engagement in Italy is listed on a row nobody priced. Richness without a denominator is a lead, not a verdict.