YouTube has always given you the chance to show off how well your videos are doing, but only to a limited extent. Aside from a star rating, view count, and of course, the infamous comments section, there hasn’t been an easy way to share more meaningful data with your audience — something that can make it harder for content partners to attract advertisers on the site. Tonight, that changes: you’ll now be able to publicly share select pieces of information from YouTube Insight, the site’s powerful analytics tool.
YouTube is currently down for scheduled maintenance to enable the feature, but some videos are already beginning to display the data (you can see a screenshot below, taken from this video).
You’ll now be able to publicly display information related to your video’s performance in various geographical regions and demographics, as well as more thorough information about which sites are driving traffic to your content. Finally, there’s a nice graph that displays your video’s popularity over time. These new data-points have all been previously available though YouTube Insight to the video’s original uploader, but this is the first time they’ll be publicly shareable.
In a way, the new feature is similar to what Quantcast has done with its ‘Quantified’ sites, which lets websites publicly share some of their traffic data without having to face accusations of having doctored it. Likewise, YouTube publishers will now be able to basically flaunt just how well their videos are doing — something that could prove very important for publishers looking to attract relevant advertisers.
