On September 10th, YouTube added three new features to its Insight analytics tool that add to our understanding of just how our videos are being viewed. The new features are 1) Discovery over time, 2) Views from mobile devices and 3) Views from subscribers.
Here's a screen shot from one of our most viewed videos, Dean Ruiz public lecture, "Earth Evolution: The Formation of Our Planet." [9,733 views]
With Discovery over Time, YouTube engineers changed the Insight graph making it easier for us to see how search, related videos, embeds, and other areas of YouTube drive our viewership. In a nutshell, what they did was take the existing ways viewing videos were tracked - by view count and popularity over time and data on how viewers found our videos.
Something my colleagues and I have discussed many times is making our resources mobile device ready. We are seeing a big jump in the number of devices students are using with wireless access, such as the iPod Touch and smart devices such as iPhones and Blackberrys. YouTube engineers report: "tens of millions of views every day from mobile phones, and since the beginning of the year YouTube uploads from phones have jumped 1700%." In the above screenshot, you can see that Dean Ruiz video has been downloaded and viewed on mobile devices 42 times. This should mean 42 times since YouTube began tracking downloads to mobile devices. BTW, if you've not held an iPod Touch or an iPhone in your own hand, you probably don't realize that they come with access to YouTube conveniently on the homescreen.
The third new analytic,"views from subscribers," is designed to help draw better conclusions about how views lead to subscriptions.
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