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YouTube Offers Insight Into Performance

Richard Koman, newsfactor.com Thu Mar 27, 4:35 PM ET

When Google paid $1.76 billion for YouTube in October 2006, industry observers all had one question: How would Google extract value out of the world's biggest user-built video site? ADVERTISEMENT

The answer, of course, was advertising. Wednesday, YouTube announced a key technology for building the video advertising business -- a video analytics feature called Insight.

YouTube Insight is "a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site," the company said on a team blog. Uploaders will be able to see how frequently videos are viewed in different parts of the world, "as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time."

Tracking Performance

Insight also provides, well, insight into how long it takes a video to achieve popularity and how a video behaves after popularity peaks.

The blog post studiously avoids mention of advertisers, except to point out to YouTube partners that "the more popular a video is, the more advertising revenue it can generate."

The tools "give a lot of context around the performance of video over time, where your audience is coming from, and how your message is connecting to your audience," YouTube Program Manager Tracy Chan said. "Effectively, YouTube has become an ad-effectiveness, or an insight-effectiveness, tool."

More Targeted Ads

Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, said the new tool "is important to YouTube advertisers, since it allows them to have more targeted ads. It should help YouTube become even more profitable over time." The ultimate test, however, will be if YouTube can "really deliver ads in context and around what people are interested in." If so, YouTube "ends up being a win-win for advertisers and consumers."

While amateur video-makers will surely appreciate the additional data, the new analytics tool will be most useful to uploaders whose videos serve some promotional purpose. Movie studios might want to track what geographic areas viewers are from and target advertising to those markets. Bands might want to know if they're drawing fans from outside their local areas and could plan tour stops around such information -- or they could time releases of new videos to coincide with best viewing times.

Producers of Web-based serials would be able to use the time-based trend information to calculate when to release the next episode.

And more data is coming. Chan said YouTube will soon start displaying referrer logs -- tools that indicate which sites are driving traffic to their videos. With YouTube's embedding feature, videos can pop up all over the Web, and promoters as well as casual users will be interested to track what sites are featuring their work.

At least one key data point -- how many viewers watch how much of a video -- will remain available only to advertisers, at least for the time being.

"YouTube has millions of viewers every single day, and has become the world's largest focus group," Chan said.