Hot on the heels of yesterday’s “buzz targeting” advertising announcement from YouTube, the video hosting service has another feature announcement. Back in March, YouTube began offering free stats to video owners about the popularity of their videos. Today, Google has announced that YouTube’s analytics are adding a new layer of meaning for video owners: demographic information.
YouTube’s analytics program, Insight, originally featured information on:
- how many people have viewed your video
- what day of the week you get the most views
- where people live who are watching your video
- insight into popularity of your video
Now they’ve added
a new demographics tab that displays view count information broken down by age group (such as ages 18-24), gender, or a combination of the two, to help you get a better understanding of the makeup of your YouTube audience.
Now before privacy advocates get all het up, the information is given to video owners “in anonymous and aggregate form, based on the birth date and gender information that users share with us when they create YouTube accounts.” (Okay, privacy advocates, go ahead and get het up now. We know you’re going to anyway.)
Another new feature will show the total number of views on all your videos, as well as “your relative popularity on YouTube compared to other users, based on geographic location.”
Insight information is still located under Account > My Videos > Insight. Google says that video owners have already begun modifying their uploading habits (and I’m sure the content they’ve produced) based upon Insight’s popularity information. I’m sure that this will only continue that trend. And you know how I feel about data 
.
