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YouTube is the most popular video-sharing community online today. Recently, YouTube officials have announced the launch of their newest marketing tool called YouTube Insight. This feature tracks the views of each video a user posts, and provides the users with potentially valuable marketing information. According to YouTube’s blog, this tool “enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time.” The blog goes on to list other advanced feature of this service, such as tacking the life cycle of an upload (which also helps to measure the popularity of the video over time). YouTube asserts that Insight will help increase the popularity of user videos by helping them to target specific users.

The catch? Some of the more advanced data will be reserved for paid advertisers. Industry experts believe that this is part of Google’s initiative to turn a profit on its $1.76 billion purchase of YouTube back in 2006. According to an article released by CNN.com, marketers will now have access to more refined data about the geographic popularity of their advertisement campaigns. While advertisers currently get large amounts of data about the performance of their ads on YouTube, this new feature will help them to target areas where their ads are most viewed. This will also, in turn, help to generate profits from YouTube’s thriving community. As the CNN article points out, “Despite growing interest in online video ads, many marketers have stayed away from user-generated video like what’s on YouTube.” This new feature will, hopefully, draw new advertisers to invest in YouTube.

However, individual YouTube users will also be able to benefit from this new tool. According to Tracy Chan, a YouTube program manager, YouTube Insight will give ” a lot of context around the performance of video over time, where are your audience coming from and how your message is connecting to your audience.” For the average user, this has positive implications. Amateur video producers, new and upcoming bands, and fresh entertainment acts (comedians, troupes of actors, etc.) could use this new feature from everything from planning a tour schedule to targeting new and bigger audiences (at least in the U.S.; one of the few criticisms of Insight is that it does not yet provide in-depth data on viewers or video popularity outside of the United States). This could potentially be a very useful marketing tool for the next generation of entertainers.

As Mr. Chan said in a recent interview, “Effectively, YouTube has become an ad-effectiveness, or an insight-effectiveness, tool. YouTube has millions of viewers every single day, and has become the world’s largest focus group.” YouTube Insight will undoubtedly add to the already enormous popularity of the YouTube web community. By being able to specifically target areas where a certain genre of videos and ads will be most popular, users and marketers alike will have a lot to gain from the use of this service. It looks like Google can soon expect to see that profit margin it has been hoping for from this website.

Friday, March 28th, 2008 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

By Michael Gorvin