This Just In…

YouTube becoming “world’s biggest focus group”

June 5, 2008

Thanks to a new feature on YouTube called “Insight,” anyone posting videos on the site can now gather marketing data about the people who watch them. As the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday, the service was launched in March and gives YouTube account holders who have uploaded videos to the site a range of statistics, charts and maps about their audiences.

The free service could mean big changes in how rock bands, television shows, movies and consumer products are promoted on the Internet, the paper reported. Data available through Insight include the age, gender and geographic location of audience members, and the Internet sites they visited before and after watching a YouTube clip. Marketers use the data to target ads or decide where bands should tour, the Los Angeles Times quoted Tracy Chan, product manager of YouTube Insight, as saying.

“YouTube is becoming the world’s biggest focus group,” he said.

“What’s distinct about YouTube Insight is the immediacy of the information and the discovery element — how viewers found the content,” the paper quoted Ben Patterson, who worked on digital marketing strategy for the alternative rock band Weezer, as saying. Three days after the group posted its new music video “Pork & Beans” (see below) on YouTube, 2.2 million people had watched it. And according to Insight, 65 percent of them were men. The data the band gathered from the service reportedly has it wondering whether it should curtail advertising in traditional spots such as local alternative weeklies and banner ads across music blogs and sites. — Compiled by Greg Beaubien for Tactics and The Strategist Online