YouTube adds in-depth analytics to all videos
By Sean P. Aune
YouTube has added more in-depth analytics that, for better or worse, are visible to everyone by default.
Many people live or die by the analytics for their projects, but is it always a good idea to make those statistics available to any one who cares to see them?
For as long as there has been a World Wide Web, there have been people who want to know where their traffic comes from. And for as long as there has been a YouTube, people have wanted more information about where their videos are embedded, how their traffic is generated and just more information about how their video is performing. Well, YouTube has launched a more in-depth analytics now to do all of that, but for some odd reason they opted to make the information available to any one who cares to look by default.
While video producers have the option of turning the analytics reports private, it has to be done manually to each of their videos one at a time. It is unlikely that someone who posts a video of their puppies is going to care very much, but to business that post ad campaigns, viral hits and other marketing videos, this may be a bit more information than they care to share with their competition.
The new analytics offer far more information than has been available before by showing you when a referral first came from a source, the first time a video got embedded on another site, what demographics the video is most popular with, what countries the traffic is coming from and more. Most companies and professionals are very guarded about this type of information, so it is surprising that YouTube would leave this open by default, forcing users to make the change on a case by case basis. Wouldn’t it have been better to leave it closed and let each producer choose if they wanted to share it with the world?
In the meantime, go over to any video and click on “Statistics & Data” link for a video, some fairly interesting info is in there.
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on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 2:45 pm
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