YouTube Insight: Underwhelming

Google's YouTube announced a tool, called YouTube Insight, but it doesn't seem all that great. The company says it can "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." It's gotten a ton of coverage from the media.

But while the information you get is interesting, it's so broad that it strikes me as underwhelming. I tried it out on the most popular video I ever uploaded -- popular, I should add, for reasons that are unfathomable to me. Its title is "Loudest Car at CES," and I posted it from the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2007. It has since had 46,833 views.

The Insight tool shows me that it first broke 100 views a day on May 19, 2007 -- five months after the video was posted. I can follow a timeline and see that it passed 300 views a day on October 26, and even now gets nearly 200 views a day. I can also see that almost every viewer comes from the U.S.

I can see some other geographic oddities -- like, on Oct. 30, it was a very popular video in Namibia! (Like...huh??)

But that's about it. That's all I get from Insight. No idea why this video got popular when it did or where. I suppose a band might be able to find out that its music videos are extremely popular in some far-flung nation, and could make decisions to market or tour there. I'm sure there are other ways this is useful to marketers and potential YouTube advertisers. But hopefully YouTube will eventually give us more refined ways to slice and dice this stuff.

(YouTube Insight map)

. □