YouTube Adds Extra Functionality for Publishers

Re-visiting YouTube

Believe it or not, I haven’t popped into YouTube.com for some time now - I imagine it’s because we’ve been blessed in the UK with BBC’s iPlayer of late. The addictive pull of shows like “The Secret Millionaire”, “Dragon’s Den” and “Top Gear” has been little less than Televised Crack Cocaine… I imagine. (No really, it’s just in my imagination.)

Really!

I’ve just been shuffling things around here at AdIncomeOnline.com, specifically giving attention to the different Page Tabs which provide links to additional pages here at the blog. The Video Page still linked out to some very early YouTube content of ours and required updating, which is what took me back to YouTube.com for a browse.

The image included above, promoting added functionality, caught my eye and prompted me to explore further. I liked the look of the updates, and thought it worthwhile to draw attention to them here at the blog:

Video Annotations

At first, my excitement was verging on uncontainable, and I feared that I may re-enter that phase of life where wetting my pants was the norm. You see, the ability to post a video to YouTube, with links to my websites or affiliate programs, was too much for one man’s bladder to cope with… then I realised, my excitement short lived, that YouTube had saved me the need to cope with such ecstasy: it’s not possible to embed external links within our YouTube videos :o( But…

It is possible, however, to enhance your videos in other ways. In the words of the great YouTube:

Video Annotations are a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos! Use them to: 1) Add background information about the video. 2) Create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene). 3) Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video.

All of the above!

You control what the annotations say, where they appear on the video, and when they appear and disappear.

It basically means that, with regards to prompting our viewers to navigate elsewhere, we can drive extra traffic to specific YouTube videos that we may want to promote more than others; ie. Use high traffic content to highlight a video promoting a new site that you’ve launched, or an affiliate offer for example. Use your imagination! :o)

Visit YouTube’s “Interacting with Videos” Help Page for more info.

YouTube Insight

YouTube Insight is YouTube’s external facing analytics and reporting product that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site.

It’s pretty much YouTube’s answer to Google Analytics - they ARE practically the same company.

This first version charts video views on an interactive timeline and map, allowing users to search different geographic regions and see the viewing activity in those regions over selected time periods. It also allows users to compare the relative popularity of their videos in a given region to all other videos in that region.

And how should you go about utilising ‘YouTube Insight’?

To see Insights on your own videos, log on to YouTube and click the “Insight” button under “Account” > “My Videos” > “Insight”.

Feel free to comment using the “Leave a Comment” box below!