http://www.beet.tv/2008/11/youtube-evoluti.html
As YouTube expands its offering of professionally produced--and advertising-appropriate--videos, its analytics tool YouTube Insight will become increasingly important. YouTube's Strategic Partner Development Manager Laura Lee explained the value of YouTube Insight for both content creators and marketers at the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable last month.
"That tool I think has been really powerful especially to our content publishers, because they can go in and say, 'You know what, I can make marketing decisions, I can even make programming decisions online real time to drill down on a per state level in the U.S. to see how people are really consuming my content," she says.
In late September, YouTube introduced a new feature for Insight called Hot Spots to allow publishers not only to see their most popular videos, but the most popular parts within their videos. We expect Insight to get even more sophisticated with YouTube's new focus on professional, long-form content. YouTube has already acquired television programming and feature films through its recent and much talked-about deals with CBS and MGM.
Greg Sandoval's recent story for CNET, "A coming of age for YouTube," describes YouTube's recent monetization developments.
Insight was launched in March of last year but has not been widely discussed.
Beet.TV Popular with California Dudes!
We checked out Insight for our Beet.TV YouTube channel and learned a few facts about our audience demographic: It's 70 percent male and largely based in California. We posted the Insight graph of the data below:
--Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer
11/21/08 Update: Richard Siklos at Fortune has a story today on the move away from user-generated content at YouTube.