Comments for YouTube Now Offering Second-by-Second Analytics

YouTube Now Offering Second-by-Second Analytics

2008-09-30T19:34:07Z

YouTube announced today an interesting addition to its Insights analytics dashboard. Called "Hot Spots," the feature displays the "bounce rate" of viewers in any publisher's video on a second-by-second scale. Wondering if that joke you told went over well or not? YouTube will now tell you if a substantial number of viewers clicked away from your content at the moment your wisecrack went live.

The Insights analytics tool launched in May and offers free demographic data about viewers. We'd love to see these two features combined. Worried something you said might come across as sexist? If a whole lot of women stopped watching right after you said it - there might be some truth to that! (Who are we kidding? This is YouTube we're talking about.)

]]> Update: This post has been submitted to Digg where savvy reader MissWATCH asks the question: "i wonder what would it say about Rick Roll and 2 Girls 1 Cup." Awesome.

The service isn't just tracking departures in pure numbers, either, it's pretty sophisticated:

The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. 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.

Numbers are cool - benchmarks relative to the numbers of other related content are even cooler. That's the kind of thing that no video startup could meaningfully offer - just YouTube with its giant network effect and perhaps some of the other giant video services.

We were unable to test the feature ourselves. Neither old nor new videos have the Hot or Not link displayed for us yet. We'll be keeping an eye on them for sure.

In some ways Hot Spots may be more interesting than Insights demographics initially was. Viewer demographics are mostly useful when considering advertising and the effectiveness of targetted promotion. ("How can I get more young men to watch this video on YouTube?" Tough question.) Bounce rate will tell you something about the specifics of your content. We like it.

Comment from Ben Ruedlinger on 2008-09-30

2008-09-30T20:41:52Z

It is interesting that YouTube is adding this and making the announcement only a day or so after Visible Measures announces their deal with MTVN.

Being able to track what people watch is critical to evaluating how effective your content is. Measuring across a large viewing population is interesting, but in some cases you want to measure at the individual level.

At Wistia ( http://wistia.com ), we provide a private video sharing platform for businesses that allow them to see the actual actions individual users take while watching the videos. If I share a new product demo video with my prospect, Bob, I can see exactly which parts of the video Bob watched, which parts he didn't, and which parts he watched multiple times. Next time I talk to him, I'll know exactly what he has seen and how engaged he is with our new product release.

To see a brief demo of our video engagement tracking, check out: ( http://wistia.com/tracking ).

Comment from Ryan G on 2008-09-30

2008-09-30T22:01:26Z

Second-by-second is quite impressive. What's the catch?

Comment from Mudassir on 2008-09-30

2008-09-30T22:38:43Z

Wow, This is another step towards google progress. It would definitely help the video posters to watch their traffic and eventually it will help them to improve. Thanks!

Mudassir
http://www.socialmediaplex.com

Comment from Nick Stamoulis on 2008-09-30

2008-10-01T00:20:21Z

This is great for content creators but how does this help monetize YouTube? Isn't that their biggest issue? I think there needs to be more time spend on that issue.

Comment from Nick on 2008-09-30

2008-10-01T00:31:24Z

Wow this is impressive, I look after a couple of branded channels and I can see this helping us massively in terms of getting our content right.

Good work Google :)

Comment from DJ Chang on 2008-09-30

2008-10-01T04:55:02Z

Catching up with competition. With their volume, the competitors may be at a disadvantage.

Comment from EI Penny on 2008-10-01

2008-10-01T10:29:07Z

Does anyone know why it works for some videos but not others? This tool is really useful but won’t show the Hot Spots tab for random videos.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it completly random or is there a reason the Hot Spots tab doesn’t show?

Any advice?

Comment from angela penny on 2008-10-01

2008-10-01T18:29:31Z

I wish you could see this information for other people's vids.

Comment from Blah on 2008-10-01

2008-10-01T20:17:36Z

I would have loved not to click through to the original article to find the link to what you're even talking about http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_insight

Feels a lot more blog spam'ish than it already is when that happens.

Comment from psychic readings on 2008-10-01

2008-10-01T23:32:46Z

thanks for the information here, interesting : )

Comment from Andy on 2008-10-01

2008-10-02T02:27:27Z

This is definitely helpful for those of us that work in Social Media at least. I'm actually going to have to go check out some of my videos now.

Comment from website design on 2008-10-01

2008-10-02T03:01:07Z

way to step it up Google!

Comment from davevideo on 2008-10-02

2008-10-02T12:22:11Z

Interesting. This brings YouTube ever closer to standard video on demand hosting packages, and all for free. Good news for all of us - it means video hosting companies will have to keep coming up with more detailed and advanced analysis for video, which is never a bad thing.

Comment from Cholula Puebla on 2008-10-06

2008-10-07T06:56:55Z

That really sounds like an interesting addition. Thank you for the update. I'll check it out.