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New YouTube Tool Tracks Viewers

This story was written by David Kaplan.


YouTube says it has a new analytics tool that will answer the existential questions its video creators have always been curious about: Who's watching this? Where do viewers come from? How did they find my video?

As YouTube explains on its official blog, the new tool that will supply those answers is called YouTube Insight. Anyone with a YouTube account can use the free program, which can tell uploaders how often their videos are watched in different geographic regions (NYT mentions that the regional breakdown function only works in the U.S.; internationally, it only identifies what country is doing the most viewing).

Users can also determine the popularity of their work relative to all videos in that market over a given time period, detailing what days of the week a particular video tends to be most viewed and when the amount of views has peaked.

YouTube believes that members of its ad-sharing partner program will be able to use Insight to help them gauge what sort of videos will help them make more money.


By David Kaplan

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