Internet search leader Google has added a free metrics feature to its popular video sharing service YouTube,  which will allow video creators to see when and where viewers are watching their videos, the company announced Wednesday as it launched its new YouTube Insight service. Video creators can use the new metrics tool to see which are the most popular days and times for watching the videos they have uploaded to YouTube, and which countries are providing the most viewers, or in the case of the United States, in which states their videos are most popular. The new video data, shown in graph and map formats, will be updated daily and is available only to the original video submitter. Insight Into Basic Viewer Information By giving its video publishers this additional viewer information, YouTube hopes to foster the type of fine tuning that could lead to more people watching videos, as publishers and marketers learn more about the people watching their YouTube videos. YouTube Insight product manager Tracy Chan hopes that YouTube Insight, which is available to anyone with a YouTube account, will help video publishers answer some of the basic questions about viewers. "Who were these people? How did they find this video? Where did they come from? ," Chan wrote Wednesday in a formal announcement of the new metrics tool on the official Google blog. The SearchEngineWorld image to the right shows an example of the types of maps and graphics the new YouTube Insight metrics tool can create. YouTube hopes more marketers will use the video sharing service as a message testing ground. "Insight turns YouTube into one of the world's largest focus groups," Chan said. "Advertisers can study their metrics and successes to tailor their marketing - both on and off the site - and reach the right viewers," Chan added. The new viewer information could be applied to help make money from the advertisements that are shown alongside, or in some cases within, YouTube videos. YouTube partners in particular, typically independent video creators and media companies in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. who regularly submit popular videos, could use the new metrics information to generate more advertising revenue. YouTube Popularity Up 84 Percent Film production companies or studios might test several versions of a movie trailer on YouTube and use the new metrics data to see in which states or countries viewers are watching each version the most. YouTube Insight allows  video publishers to see how popular their videos are relative to all videos in a related market and to determine when a video's popularity peaks, Chan said. In 2006 Google purchased YouTube, the world's largest video sharing Web site, for $1.76 billion, and has since sought to make money from the acquisition. Since the purchase the popularity of YouTube has increased dramatically, with the number of monthly visitors globally increasing to 269 million in February, an 84 percent increase from one year earlier, according to data from Reston, Virginia-based Web traffic analysis firm comScore. The metrics tools launched Wednesday could help YouTube capitalize on the site's growing popularity, and help video publishers "evaluate metrics to better serve and understand their audiences, as well as increase ad revenue," according to Chan. The new metric data adds to the basic usage statistics YouTube already offers, such as how many times a video has been viewed, the results of user ratings of the video, and a count of how many comments have been written about it. YouTube shows the number of times a video is started in its public count of overall views, although paid advertisers can see separate counts showing how many viewers watch all, half, or a quarter of a video. YouTube Adds Insight Free Video Metrics Tool YouTube Insight uses the same numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address identification system as Google's online advertising systems, to give a general idea about where viewers reside geographically. Marketers might, for example, use the new YouTube Insight data to learn that one of their videos received the  most views from people in Jamaica on Mondays during autumn months, and make adjustments accordingly to appeal to the newly discovered target audience. "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," YouTube employees wrote in a Wednesday company blog post. Chan said that YouTube expects to incorporate more information about who is viewing videos within the next several weeks, including a detailed breakdown of how viewers found each video, whether through a search engine or a link on another Web site, a move that will likely be a boon to online video marketers. Related Links:
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10:13 pm on Mar. 27, 2008 (utc 0)