Google Gives YouTubers More Video Data

Posted on March 27, 2008

Google announced that they are providing a little more data about YouTube videos for the people that uploaded them.

Today we're taking our first step towards answering these questions with YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account -- users, partners, and advertisers -- to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload. 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. For now, you can find currently available metrics by clicking under the "About this Video" button under My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.

That's useful information but Google Operating System notes that data about where videos have been embedded is not included.

The analytics data is really basic and doesn't include a lot of interesting information like the sites that embed your videos, the most important sources of traffic, how many people view the full video or play it again etc.

Where online these videos are being watched is likely of great interest to YouTubers. YouTubers would probably find this information as valuable as where in the world people are watching them. There is a little bit of data underneath the videos about where people clicked from and you could post the video's URL into Technorati but this probably wouldn't turn up all the embeds. Pulse2.0 found this video about YouTube Insight.

Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee says that YouTube has promised to eventually include this valuable referrer information.

In a packet of emailed information, YouTube pointed out that its partners (which include established users and media companies) can utilize the Insight stats to increase their revenue. But to truly offer useful analytics YouTube needs to show the relations between videos, track search engine keywords, and measure the portion of a video a viewer watches before clicking away, among other things. YouTube did say it will soon add in referrer logs to show how viewers discovered a video.

On an unrelated note Google/YouTube also posted the message about YouTube Insight on the YouTube blog. Based on the comments some people are very angry that YouTube took away the "sort by most viewed" feature from the YouTube search. That was a useful feature - why did they take it away?