Google announced this morning that YouTube's new Insight video viewer analytics now includes free demographic stats on any video's viewers. YouTube users who have included gender in their user profiles can be anonymously reported and providing your age is a requirement to open an account with YouTube.
It's interesting to know that my latest video about late night escapades was viewed primarily by men ages 30 to 50. In a few minutes I will embed in this post a video of myself eating a live baby chicken and will report back on viewer demographics when they become available. You can view the demographics on your videos by clicking the "insight" button next to each video on your account view.

Geographic location is also reported as part of the Insight package. Statistics can be limited to any time frame and are viewable side by side with metrics on a video's relative popularity and leading sources of off-site inbound traffic. It's a great little metrics package.
Presumably YouTube isn't getting all Facebook Beacon on us and tracking the demographics of users logged into YouTube but viewing videos embedded around the web. That would be a positive thing to see in anonymous aggregate. Since such views are unlikely to be counted, perhaps I should spare the fluffy little baby chick. Oh what the heck, let's give it a try.
These kinds of statistics were presumably available for advertisers, in large quantities, since the dawn of YouTube. Breaking them out on a video by video basis and offering a nice interface is a very logical next step but one that too few services online would take the time to provide - much less for free.
It would be nice if users were given the option to publicly expose their video Insight statistics and could view them on a chanel-wide basis instead of just for a single video. Update! I was wrong, several readers pointed out that YouTube does offer aggregate demographics of all your videos! Thanks, friends!
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I think this is a great addition for YouTube. For companies like mine that use video to promote their services and offers, this will provide clean cut numbers that will allow everyone to change scope if needed. Kudos to YouTube.
Check out my small video projects on YouTube promoting my web design company, www.BonnerSpringsWebDesign.com. I would love some feedback!
Posted by: Paul Adams | May 16, 2008 8:44 AM
Very cool! Also, I just noticed that they rolled out RSS feeds for most viewed, etc.... on a country-by-country basis.
Posted by: Frank Sinton | May 16, 2008 9:36 PM