Features include:

• A Quick Overview: A new overview provides all of the information that you care about quickly, while also enabling you to easily access more detailed information.
• More Detailed Reports: Analytics now includes more detailed statistics so that you can have a more precise understanding of your content and audiences.
• Audience Builders: Discover which videos are driving the most views and subscriptions.
• Audience Retention: See how far viewers are watching through your video in the new audience retention report.

YouTube’s Creator Playbook has been updated showing how to use the new Analytics:

YouTube is also sharing this related infographic:

YouTube Analytics will be released to everyone using a modern browser throughout today.

I know what you’re thinking. Wait a second, Jordan—the last one doesn’t have anything to do with data.

And you’d be right. Until now. YouTube’s Content ID and Insight programs are linking up—now data owners will be able to view stats from not just the videos that they own, but also others’ videos that use their content:

Previously, when you claimed a video with Content ID, we were only able to show you basic information (like view counts and tags) associated with the video you claimed. But now, all the statistics and data we share directly with uploaders in YouTube Insight is available to Content ID partners too, making our content management tools more useful than ever — especially for partners whose claimed user videos generate lots of views for them. For example, using Insight with claimed content, Sony Music learned that the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video is currently the music label’s 8th most popular video on YouTube.

Now content owners will have access to lots more data from UGC videos that use their content:

• rankings
• demographics
• discovery sources
• “other metrics for videos that you’ve claimed”
• and compare them to their own uploads

Yes, you’ll be able to tell if those two-bit hacks are totally upstaging you with their blurry, shaky video of amateur dancing and poor sound quality.

Ouch.

While I’m all for more data, I wonder if this isn’t going to be a gateway for abuse. The Content ID system is used to identify copyright-infringing videos—but often, if the content owners can advertise on the UGC videos, the users are given tacit permission to use the content. If the content owners get jealous of these videos’ status and rankings, might they request removal because of copyright violations?

Yeah, in the end it’d probably be shooting themselves in the foot—but seriously, when do people ever have that much foresight when it comes to the Internet and business?

What do you think? Shouldn’t content owners have access to data from all videos using their content? Or is this going to open the gateway for content owners’ world YouTube domination?

Comments

A post on the Official Google Blog acknowledged, "Previously, when you claimed a video with Content ID, we were only able to show you basic information (like view counts and tags) associated with the video you claimed."  So random teens who posted clips of Letterman might have access to more stats than CBS.

The post then continued, "But now, all the statistics and data we share directly with uploaders in YouTube Insight is available to Content ID partners too, making our content management tools more useful than ever – especially for partners whose claimed user videos generate lots of views for them." 

Indeed, the integration of Content ID and YouTube Insight is likely to offer content creators the sort of valuable information about audiences that they often commission expensive studies to obtain.  And now the information will come from an authentic spectrum of YouTube users, rather than whatever small sample a polling firm might contact.

This positive change probably counts as one of several that a senior product manager hinted at earlier this month, so stay tuned to see what else is on the way.

- Discovery over time
- Views from mobile devices
- Views from subscribers

The Discovery Over Time feature is really a combination of two existing features – the ability to track a video’s view count/popularity over time, and the Discovery section that shows how viewers found a video. The Discovery Over Time feature provides a graph that shows how people have discovered your video over time.

YouTube has added the Mobile Views feature because of the huge increase in mobile video watching. "As more and more people use smart phones, the number of views and uploads we get from mobile devices has exploded: we get tens of millions of views every day from mobile phones, and since the beginning of the year YouTube uploads from phones have jumped 1700%," says YouTube.

The Views From Subscribers feature lets users track views from different subscription modules, like homepage subscriptions, the subscriptions page, and subscription email. Note that the feature won’t work for views from before September, because YouTube has only had it turned on for a week.

YouTube says that they will be releasing more features for YouTube Insight soon. They give no clues as to what these features will be, however.

The White House references an article from Micah L. Sifry at techPresident, who looks at YouTube Insight data to see what regions some of the President’s speeches were most popular in.

I would imagine that if you run through all of the White House videos, more of them will have the strongest popularity in the United States, but of the ones the White House picks out specifically, only one of them had the US as the location where it was most popular, and that was Obama’s speech to the Muslim World in Cairo.

Here is a look at a couple more:

The President’s Video Message to the Iranian People on the Nowruz Holiday

The President’s Speech in Ghana

This information is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it illustrates how YouTube users (including businesses) can look at data that YouTube freely provides, and there is plenty more of that if you use the YouTube Insight tool. Secondly, I find it interesting that the government’s use of YouTube is clearly doing wonders for getting content viewed by the online population in appropriate parts of the world. It’s not that the information is unexpected, but it highlights the role online video, social media, and YouTube specifically are playing in current events.

On a semi-related note, Nielsen is reporting that 24.7 million people watched Obama’s prime time health care press conference. Thanks to online video and YouTube (not to mention DVR), there will likely be many more viewings still to come as well.

On another related note, YouTube is now encouaging video uploaders to share their stats from YouTube Insight on their video pages. The company recently discussed benefits to advertisers and partners.

"Whether you want to know how old your audience is, how many times your most-viewed video was rated last week, or which minute of your clip is most engaging, YouTube Insight can give you the answer. As we add functionality, we’re careful to preserve YouTube Insight’s clean and easy-to-use look and feel," says YouTube.

Last month, YouTube Insight got more focused on how viewers interact with videos. They added a community tab, which lets you view numbers related to ratings, comments, favorites, or all three.

Now you can take any information obtained through YouTube Insight a step further. A YouTube spokesperson tells WebProNews that they have added a feature that lets you export information as a CSV file, which means you can open it up in Google Docs, Microsoft Excel, or other spreadsheet programs.

"It basically means that from now on there is no limit to what users can do with their data!" the spokesperson says.

Examples YouTube gives of ways that this new feature might be useful include comparing view counts for different videos side by side, mapping out where viewers are coming from over time, or comparing discovery sources by country. Some others the spokesperson shared include:

- Combine data from all your Channels: That way, you can see how your content as a whole is doing on YouTube. This is especially useful for big partners with thousands of Channels.

- Discovery: Before, you could see whether YouTube Search or embedding drives most traffic. But what if you want to see whether the #2 search term drives more traffic than the top embed? Exporting your data allows you to do that.

As online video popularity continues to grow both in terms of content and advertising, video analytics are going to become increasingly important for getting the most out of your videos. The more freedom you have to analyze your data, the better chance you’re going to have of improving performance.

Until now, YouTube Insight has only dealt with information related to views. With this launch it  "will give uploaders information on how viewers interact with their videos," she says.

YouTube Insight was launched about a year ago, giving video uploaders a way to see how often their videos are viewed in different regions, how popular they are compared to other videos within the same market, etc.

The new feature comes under the "Community" tab, and allows you to view numbers related to:

Ratings

Comments

Favorites

Or all of the above

It also shows the average number of actions the community takes per view of your video. "For example, if it looks like your rating is 3/5 stars but the average Japanese viewer is giving you 2, while the French tend to give you 5, you’ll now know where your real fans are located," YouTube explains.

YouTube sees the addition of this feature as "a major step in the development" of the product. It sounds like it should easily be the most significant thing to happen to YouTube Insight since it launched "hot spots" in September. Hot spots allow users to pinpoint the specific parts of videos that get viewed the most. Obviously this is a good thing to know for marketing purposes.

The Community tab should be of great use to advertisers to show them how viewers are actually responding as opposed to just whether or not they viewed the video.

This information is now available to all YouTube video uploaders with an innovative new feature for Insight called "Hot Spots." 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. So what does that mean? Well, when the graph goes up, your video is hot: few viewers are leaving, and many are even rewinding on the control bar to see that sequence again. When the graph goes down, your content’s gone cold: many viewers are moving to another part of the video or leaving the video entirely.

They provide an example with a "Dancing with Soulja Boy" video:

I’m curious to see if this technology somehow finds its way into future video search projects from Google. Analyzing data based on frames throughout a video combined with the audio-based Gaudi project might make for some interesting results.

Philipp Lenssen noted a couple weeks ago when talk of "HotSpots" surfaced that advertising could be a factor as well. He quoted AdvertisingAge: "If you give users the tools to attract larger audiences, they’ll create more ad inventory."