YouTube Launches New Tools To Track Video Popularity
YouTube released new tools Wednesday to allow its video creators to chart the popularity of their online video clips and determine their money-making potential with advertisers.Â
The new service, called YouTube Insight, utilizes free software tools that display detailed statistics, such as chronological and demographic audience trends, to video creators and advertisers.
"Whether a YouTube video has 10 views or 10 million, people always want to know the same thing: Who’s watching this? Where do viewers come from? How did they find my video?," the company said in a post on its site.
According to Web traffic measurement firm comScore Inc., YouTube had 269 million monthly visitors across the world in February, an 84 percent increase from the same month a year ago.
Prior to launching the new service, YouTube offered video creators basic tools for tracking the number of comments their videos generated, the average viewer ratings and the ultimate ranking of a clip relative to all other YouTube videos. YouTube Insight now provides the added context of where viewers come from and when a particular video was viewed. Â
Advertisers themselves can use the tools to prospect for new marketing opportunities, view competitive ads and determine their return on investments for existing ads.
"YouTube has really become the world’s largest focus group," Tracy Chan, product manager for YouTube Insight, said during a phone interview with the Associated Press.
Chan explained the way in which a Hollywood studio might market a movie to YouTube viewers with the use of trailers, while a studio might simultaneously run offline, targeted newspaper and TV ads in different parts of the country.
YouTube’s analytics tool could assist the studio in determining the effectiveness of different trailers in different geographic locations and at different times, and could measure the extent in which offline ad viewers were registering on YouTube.
For example, the studio might identify heavy viewership of one of its trailers in Utah, where it had done no marketing, and thereby decide to devote further marketing attention to that state.
Chan also described how bands testing the new service have discovered pockets of their fans they didn’t know existed, and have started planning future music tours based on this data.
Chan said YouTube plans to rapidly enhance the new service, and has plans to add features to track which sites are driving users to a particular video.
—
On the Net: