News Bits: YouTube Offers Insight

Written by Frank Smith

Thursday, March 27. 2008 at 11:55 AM EDT Post a comment

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YouTube Inc. has launched an analytics tool called Insight that can track when and where its videos are being watched. The software can also track how long it took for a video to become popular, thus answering the age old question: "Who the hell likes this thing?"

The addition of analytics tools inside YouTube gives users a deeper view of how their videos are being received. It's a huge step up from wading the morass of video commenters to get an idea of what people think of a video. And, advertisers and marketers can use the metrics from Insight to better target their campaigns.

"Insight gives the creators an inside look into the viewing trends of their videos on YouTube, and helps them to increase views and become more popular. Partners can evaluate metrics to better serve and understand their audiences, as well as increase ad revenue," said YouTube product manager Tracy Chan on the Google Blog.

While Insight is a jump forward in many respects, this initial launch is currently missing deliciously nerdy tools like search engine referrals, link referrals, or stats on how much of a video was viewed.

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