YouTube has made a major change to it’s website. The main video page views counter no longer allows access to basic insight stats to both publishers & viewers.
Good move or bad move? How does it affect the Video Marketer?
I’m personally hoping that the change is just until further work is done on YouTube. Having no front end Insight statistics will not only be a hindrance to YouTube publishers but also to marketers. YouTube insight, gives us that, insight, into how & where our competitors are gaining their external traffic. Indeed we have had publishers in the past whom wanted to keep this data ‘secret’ & were able to disable the function within the YouTube Video settings to do so.
So understandably they may have opted for non disclosure of traffic and views source by calculating the amount of publishers whom press the ‘none disclosure’ button. However publishers now have to deal with the issue of having to translate the YouTube back end insight statistics to study their own stats & referrals.
Although YouTube insight doesn’t require a ‘brain surgeon’ to understand its data, the quick view ‘snap shot’ of data including embeds, referring videos, countries viewing etc has now gone, with the alternate being a long winded - click through several pages - to extract the same information but on a more intense scale. While it is good that YouTube provides such information, it is also essential that it is accessible to the average you tuber.
Maybe a better idea would be for those that wish to have access to their ‘snap shot’ data confirmed this during upload? As opposed to enforcing a one rule for all?
As originally said, I do hope that this is a temporary measure while upgrades are being made. If, however, this is something that YouTube intends to implement for the long haul, I really hope that they will reconsider.