Intelligent Enterprise

Google has deepened the analytics available to people and companies uploading video to its YouTube video social network, providing better tools to see how viewers are reacting to the content.

While available to the casual uploader, YouTube Insight is really geared towards companies and advertisers tapping the video site for marketing products and services, helping them monitor viewer activity and fine-tune strategy.

Product manager Tracy Chan acknowledges that the first iteration of Insight, launched about a year ago, was a "very, very basic product," providing statistics on the number of views per day, where those viewers are in the world, and how a video compares in popularity to other videos in a given time period.

YouTube Insight Demographics

The new features, launched last week, go a step or two further by taking a look at the YouTube community's comments and ratings about a video, providing the ability to drill down on feedback to a particular country or region in the world. Insight also provides the ability to see traffic from sites outside of YouTube that have embedded video in pages.

Chan provided a number of examples of how companies are using Insight. Mondo Media, a small animation company, used the stats to determine the optimum time to introduce new ad-supported video on its YouTube Channel.

YouTube Insight popularity reporting

Marketing firm Feed Co., which specializes in the use of advertising videos for companies, such as General Motors and Ray Ban, uses YouTube analytics for what it calls "audience mapping," which is the ability to tailor a video to a particular group of people.

Rock bands have also used Insight to hone marketing strategies. Weezer, for example, discovered through the tools that much of the traffic to the video of their single "Pork & Beans" came from technology news blogs, such as Valleywag. As a result, Weezer started using tech blogs more heavily in promoting their summer tour.

The YouTube Insight Community page

For Google, helping companies and people create videos that are more effective as marketing tools makes YouTube a better conduit for advertisers. Ads that run on YouTube videos get there through Google, which means more revenue for the search engine.

However, monetizing YouTube remains a work in progress for Google. As late as last August, chief executive Eric Schmidt said the company still hadn't figured out how to implement advertising on the site. Since then, the company has taken several steps to capitalize on ads.

An increasing number of vendors are offering a variety of tools to help companies gather and analyze customer comments on Web forums and blogs. Attensity offers such text analysis as a service over the Web.

Autonomy last week announced that it has integrated its IDOL search platform into its TeamSite Web content management software, which Autonomy acquired in January with the the purchase of Interwoven. Autonomy says IDOL will take TeamSite beyond text-based search, so publishers can eventually take better advantage of visitor-contributed content such as video.