Sam Blogs….

Following on from my previous post, regarding the song I have put up on youtube, I have found ot a few handy little tips when looking at how popular and how wide reaching your video is. As a member who has a video up, you can click on a button marked ‘insight’ when looking at your own videos. This takes you to a screen which examines views, popularity, discovery, demographics, community and hot spots. Basically these tell you all you need to know regarding the viewing figures of your video.

Looking a bit deeper, the views section plots a line graph to show when your video received the most views, plotting time span along the x axis and number of views on the y axis. This would be incredibly useful if I was a company who had posted an advert or viral video, so to measure whether or when my video was most popular and presents data which may mean you have to rethink the placement of video if the number of views are dwinderling.

The next section is popularity, this takes the form of another line graph, but instead of number of views on the y axis, it plots how popular your video is compared with others on a scale of 0 to 100. Again this would be an invaluable tool if you were utilising youtube to put information regarding a product or an advet as it would give you a comparison between your and other’s content.

Following on from that is a section on Discovery. This is the most impressive part of this entire tool, it allows you to see how people discovered your video. It plots a bar graph of how people are finding the video. The majority of ours comes from a youtube search but it is the other results that are most intriguing. It shows you how many times your video has been viewed by an external link – and on what site, so it takes me to blogs that people have posted my video on!! Amazing in my opinion, so I have had a look at what people have been saying and it is quite positive. To think if you were a company, you could see how many people had embedded your video on their pages and then see what they were saying and join in the debate! How cool is that?! Add to that you can see what people searched in google to find it and also from what other videos people went to yours from, building a huge picture of your audience.

The demographic analysis tells me that the majority of viewers are males between 18 – 24, again very useful if you are company targeted specific stakeholders. Oddly, 3% of the views are from people aged 65 and over!!

The community section is a youtube internal evaluation of where members were from who commented on or rated the video. This again will help a company in see who is engaging with the video and whether or not your video has caught the interest of an unintended audience in a different country.

The hotspots section shows the points in which most people are rewinding to during the video or when people are leaving the video, obviously this is important to show if you are keeping your viewers attention and whether or not there is a certain part of the video that people are enjoying!

Well I hope you like my insight into youtube ‘Insight’!

Incase you have missed the video, here it is again: