YouTube Hot Spots

Hopefully I have not fallen too far behind with the latest and greatest tools and developments occuring online during my holiday leave over the past two weeks.

Things that hit my inbox in my absence: more work colleagues are now on Twitter, more random people are following me on Twitter, I received more random friend requests on Facebook, more invites to sign up to obscure social networkings sites which I instantly deleted (as it is, there are too many to keep up with), junk mail filled my inbox along with plenty of client emails requesting actions and so forth. The usual really!

To get back in to the swing of things with my blog I wanted to share something that I stumbled across. An exciting new feature that tracks the success of YouTube videos has launched. The tool for YouTube Insight is called 'Hot Spots'.

Hot Spots is basically a feature that plays your video next to a graph that allows you to track your viewership at different stages of the video. As Google Blog describes, "We determine "hot" and "cold" spots by comparing your video's abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards."

The cool thing is that you can see how people are actually reacting to your videos. Previously, we have been tracking the success of videos on aggregator sites such as YouTube via the number of views or favourites each video has. This tool now allows you to also track what parts of a video that viewers like and which parts they don't based on the peaks and troughs that are represented in the graph.

Check it out!