YouTube: Statistical Goodness
Call it a means to fuel (or decimate) the ego, to better target a demographic or market niche, or merely an interesting tidbit of numerical information, YouTube’s launch today of a detailed statistics tool has given users a great deal of insight into where their clips fit amongst the video viewing masses.
Via Official Google Blog (”Insight into YouTube videos“, 26 March 2008):
“…uploaders an 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. For now, you can find currently available metrics by clicking under the “About this Video” button under My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.”
From a learning and teaching standpoint, with educators increasingly turning to YouTube and other online video streaming services as ways to not just locate content, but share their own, these statistics could provide valuable insight into the minds of their students. For example, educators might determine which subjects students found the most interesting versus the least, compare like topics over the course of several sessions, or determine trends in study habits.
In an ideal world, viewing statistics might even be combined with qualitative feedback gathered via user comments, classroom discussion and student evaluations to provide examples of teaching quality that could be fed into promotional criteria.
Educational use of streaming video in such a public sense is still relatively new however, so it will be interesting to see what real use cases emerge from online video streaming services like YouTube.
On a personal note, I’m not nearly popular enough on YouTube to derive tremendous benefit from this tool, but I do find it interesting to see that my viewers originate primarily from the United States and Western Europe.
As testimony to my uncoolness, on the Popularity Scale where 100 represents the top clip in the region and 0 is…well…not, my rating is 0.35.
Guess I won’t be quitting my day job any time soon…
References:
- ”Insight into YouTube videos“, Official Google Blog, 26 March 2008)
