News: As announced on its blog, YouTube has deployed a new set of "analytics" tools to give users more data about where viewers of their videos come from. Here's how YouTube describes it:
"For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.
"How does this help you? Well, using these metrics, you can increase your videos' view counts and improve your popularity on the site. For instance, you might learn that your videos are most popular on Wednesdays, that you have a huge following in Spain, or that new videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly. With this information, you can concentrate on creating compelling new content that appeals to your target audiences, and post these videos on days you know these viewers are on the site. (Maybe even post your next video in Spanish?) And for those of you who are also partners, the more popular a video is, the more advertising revenue it can generate."
Analysis: First thing first, "Insight" is so hard to find on YouTube. Here's how you find the button to get the data: you can find currently available metrics by clicking under the "About this Video" button under "My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos." Someone in user interface should be fired for burying this function in a place where few people can find it.
But once you get to Insight, it does deliver some insight. For example, I now have confirmation that most of the recent viewers of my video reviewing Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc restaurant in Napa Valley originate from California, as I guessed. I do like this basic information.
But the "popularity" ranking, which tabulates how popular the video is among all videos from a region, seems pretty pointless to me. It would be far better to have comparisons by subject matter for different genres. People can already guess how popular -- or not -- their videos are by simply looking at the total number of views.
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