SDA India is an online resource for Software, Development,IT, Architecture, Open Source, Mobile, Security, Databases, Delphi, C, OS, Asp, .Net, Php, Xml, Java

YouTube has recently revealed a free tool, called YouTube Insight, on the company's blog. This is a free video analytics tool designed to help video makers understand more about where their viewers are and how those viewers found their videos. Stats

The toolset enables anyone with a YouTube account to view statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, anyone uploading a video can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.

The information YouTube is providing -- view count over time and views by country -- is considerably more limited than similar data Google offers Web site owners through Google Analytics, which in turn reveals less about site visitors than Web server logs.

The metrics YouTube is making available are likely to be appreciated by marketers and professional video makers, who can use the information to see where videos are popular and to correlate changing viewership with related promotions and events. A movie studio that uploads a trailer for free on YouTube could use those details to see where the clip is most popular and perhaps buy ads targeted to users in that region — on YouTube and even on television.

Earlier this month, Web traffic measurement firm comScore reported YouTube accounted for one-third of the 9.8 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. during January 2008. By allowing users to track those numbers with greater dexterity, marketing and advertising rates can be calculated with greater precision. "One thing we've heard from our community is that they want our help in making their videos more popular on the site," a YouTube spokesperson said. "Before, if a user wanted to see how a video was doing on the site, they only had a static number " total view count " with no context about how that view count fluctuated over time, or where those views came from."

Google may, overtime, expand the breadth of information it exposes to video makers about YouTube viewers, but privacy concerns are likely to prevent it from revealing identifying information like viewer IP addresses. Video makers who find that information useful would be well advised to embed YouTube videos on their own sites, where they have full access to server logs.