When YouTube.com first debuted, most people looked at it and said, “It’s quaint and fun but is there really any value to this?” That is not to say that YouTube.com did not look like it was not entertaining. In fact, YouTube.com was a fun, original source of hours of entertainment. The question was, was there any value to YouTube.com other than its entertainment value? Could there be anything serious attached to YouTube.com or would it forever remain little more than yet another fun online diversion?
Well, time has answered that question in many ways: Equally like many other things YouTube.com has became a wonderful free resource for marketers. A multitude of products are marketed today on youtube, as often times marketing comes with virtually no costs at all!
While youtube as a marketing medium has evolved, the underlying architecture was never changed or developed to provide statistical visibility. A significant percentage of marketing functions can be made effective with testing and tracking. For doing this the underlying data capture functions
have to be in place.
After Google’s acquisition of Youtube, many video proponents predicted massive overhauling to the underlying architecture by google to monetize the site
in many different way that are only known to google itself. It did not happen that quick.
Finally yesterday Google announced that it will release a tracking application for videos on youtube, I am sure they will make it available for http://Videos.google.com
Untill now you could only see how many times your video was viewed.( the number doesn’t include how many times a video was seen completely, if someone played the video and stopped it right away that would still count). In addition to the view count comments and ratings provided some visibility.
While its known that geo data(who is watching the video, from which country in the world or which state in US) will be provided in the tracking tool,
what other features will be included is not known.
Will this new tracking tool help advertisers make better choices, induce some hope into internet advertising industry and resuce the social media
site’s poor performance in meeting the ad revenue forecasts?
Only time will tell!