NOTE: Post also appears on Waggener Edstrom’s Thinkers & Doers blog.

I’m a big fan of YouTube Insight.

As with most content published via social media, there is always a degree of trial and error – especially when it comes to video. It’s the reason so few videos ever actually do achieve “viral” status. Nonetheless, video marketing has become slightly more scientific based on the analytics you can pull from various hosting platforms. In particular, I’ve found the data from YouTube Insights to be incredibly useful for tailoring content to a specific audience’s interests.

Just recently, I discovered that YouTube has now extended access to most of their analytics to the public. In other words, any person watching any video on YouTube can now look at various statistics including total views, comments/favorites/ratings, links, audience demographics, honors and more. This isn’t breaking news, but it also wasn’t something that was buzzing around when it was put in place in June. In my eyes, this is HUGE.

Think about the competitive insight that YouTube has just opened up. Rather than dig deep on details, I highly encourage you to hop over to this fantastic post by CJ Bruce that goes into details about how to maximize use of all the data provided. I’ve also included a quick graphic below so you can see how to access the analytics from any individual video page (note, not a channel).

Cheers,
Scott