Mountain View, California-based Google has added a feature to its popular online video property YouTube it calls  HotSpots, that was able to show a second-by-second popularity graph for of each video, a measurement tool that could allow video producers to fine tune their online works and gain bigger online audiences. YouTube announced the new HotSpots feature, which was available free to anyone who uploads a video as a part of its Insight usage metrics program, in a statement released Tuesday. HotSpots Adds To YouTube's Metrics Tool Insight The new HotSpots feature, with the ability to see a graph showing which portions of a YouTube video are the most popular, including those sections that have been rewound and watched repeatedly, along with the points where viewers stop watching entirely, came as part of Google's plan to increase revenue from the Web's most popular video sharing site, which it purchased in 2006 for $1.76 billion. YouTube said Tuesday that video creators would no longer have to guess which portions within a video held viewers attention most successfully, calling HotSpots "the world's largest focus group." "Now that Insight shows what parts of videos viewers are watching and skipping, creators no longer have to play guessing games," according to YouTube product managers Tracy Chan and Nick Jakobi, who announced the new feature together in a message posted on Google's Web site. The SearchEngineWorld image to the right shows an example of a YouTube Insight HotSpots graph. HotSpots was added to YouTube Insight, a video analytics service Google introduced in March which gave video creators a way to see which were the most popular days and times for watching the videos they had uploaded to YouTube, and which countries were providing the most viewers, or in the case of the United States, in which states their videos were most popular. Insight began showing that information in graph and map formats and updating it on a daily basis for the original submitter of each YouTube video to see, and with Tuesday's addition of HotSpots video publishers were able to glean even more information about the most and least popular spots within individual videos. Attract More Viewers By Editing Out "Cold" Spots Chan and Jakobi said that "millions" of people had used Insight since its introduction to "learn more about your YouTube videos and figure out when, where, and why your videos are popular," and noted that the new HotSpots feature would  show "which specific parts of those videos are hotter than others." The feature was added as a new "Hot Spots" tab within the YouTube Insight control panel, and used a graph to show "exactly when viewers tend to leave your videos, or which scenes within a video they watch again and again," Chan and Jakobi said in the Tuesday announcement. The tool worked by playing a video alongside the HotSpots graph, with a bar on the graph moving as the video played, showing where viewer interest created spikes or valleys on the accompanying graph. YouTube said that baseline popularity figures were taken from other videos of similar length on the site and used to determine viewer interest. "We determine 'hot' and 'cold' spots by comparing your video's abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards
rewinding on the control bar to see that sequence again," Jakobi and Chan said. YouTube did not note whether the comparisons were done with all other videos on the site of similar lengths, or only with those in similar topical categories. YouTube HotSpots Feature Shows Most And Least Watched Segments Within Videos Having access to which points in a video were the most likely to be skipped over using YouTube's built-in media player could allow video creators to make changes that might better hold the attention of the people watching their videos. "Advertisers and agencies can study the effectiveness of their creative, to make sure they keep viewers' attention throughout an ad," YouTube said Tuesday. The YouTube tool could be used by advertisers, for example, looking to find which of several ads was the most likely to be viewed in its entirety, or by film makers trying to find the most popular movie preview among various versions. Advertisers could use the HotSpots tool to see "what parts of ads keep viewers," according to a YouTube spokesperson in a recent Wired report. "A number of users have figured out how to increase their traffic by large degrees and doubled their number of views by making simple changes," the spokesperson added. 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, and in turn to greater revenue for Google. The HotSpots metrics tool launched Tuesday could help YouTube capitalize on the site's dominance and growing popularity. Related Links :
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7:59 pm on Oct. 1, 2008 (utc 0)