Knowing Your Audience on YouTube

Yesterday, Google announced that YouTube’s Insight video viewer analytics now includes free demographic information on any clip’s viewers. Uploaders can click on the “insight” button that appears alongside their uploaded vids to see viewership stats that include gender, age, and geography. The analysis relies on data picked up from YouTube viewers’ profiles - so only the watchers that have indicated their location, age, and gender in their profile (and are signed in while viewing) are included in the statistical results. Insight also gives uploaders the option to view an aggregate of their viewer statistics from all their clips. ReadWriteWeb reports:

Statistics can be limited to any time frame and are viewable side by side with metrics on a video’s relative popularity and leading sources of off-site inbound traffic..

Presumably YouTube isn’t getting all Facebook Beacon on us and tracking the demographics of users logged into YouTube but viewing videos embedded around the web. That would be a positive thing to see in anonymous aggregate.

These kinds of statistics were presumably available for advertisers, in large quantities, since the dawn of YouTube. Breaking them out on a video by video basis and offering a nice interface is a very logical next step but one that too few services online would take the time to provide - much less for free.

ReadWriteWeb: Who’s Watching Your Video?