YouTube Insight… It’s Like Google Analytics
Christian Vuong :: March 27th, 2008
YouTube recently launched their own version of Google Analytics known as YouTube Insight.
As mentioned in their blog, this tool is available for free to all YouTube users, partners and advertisers.
What exactly does this mean?
Users now have a stronger tool to analyze the metrics of both the page views and popularity of their videos. YouTube Insight also goes into detail by sorting data by countries and given time periods (ranging from 5 days to 1 year max).
Insight is particularly powerful to the music industry, where they can now track artist and music video popularity by region, view popularity peaks, and further coordinate their marketing efforts with regions where their artists are doing well.
It would be interesting to see if there are plans in the near future to implement any deeper analytics or features already available in Google Analytics and Webmasters Central, especially since Google owns YouTube.
Top features we would like to see:
- Traffic Sources - Where are the clicks coming from? Are they tied to a blog post? What if the blog post is a negative one?
- Keywords & Searches - Is the traffic coming from searches for certain keywords? How is the video ranking for those words?
It will be interesting to see if this drastically changes our perception of what a “successful” YouTube video actually is. Unless Insight can prove otherwise, I’ll just continue to assume that the skateboarding dog is a worldwide hit.
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March 28th, 2008 at 7:39 am
How does the dog do that? Dogs are rad.
March 28th, 2008 at 10:02 am
Ah, so the answer to how to market Youtube becomes apparent. Delivering highly targeted ads based on the analytics in Insight makes “the tube” a possible cash cow. GG Google. You’ve done it again.
Now, if ads were displayed in this way would users receive a share of ad revenue for their videos? For example, would the creator of Chocolate Rain be raking it in because of the popularity of his video being seen millions of times? If so, I’m making the most ridiculous video possible ASAP!
March 28th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
I’m sure My First Bus Ride would be a smash hit if there are any takers out there with a video camera.
Oh, I’ve got ideas, I’ve got ideas.
April 1st, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Just this morning (before I read this entry), I was looking around the YouTube site map trying to find data on the most popular videos. All I could find was “Most Viewed” with daily, weekly, monthly, and all time sorting options. I really would love to know why “Evolution Of Dance” is the most viewed video on all of YouTube (with over 80 million views!), broken down by regional popularity and so forth.
Maybe I’m just a data nerd, but I think I would derive more pleasure from looking at statistics on YouTube than from watching most of the videos.