September 30, 2008, 8:04 PM — Delivering on a pledge made earlier this year, Google has again improved usage metrics for YouTube videos, making it possible for account holders to measure the popularity of different parts of a clip.
This new feature, available to all people who have uploaded videos to YouTube, is called Hot Spots and displays a graph that indicates continuous fluctuations in viewership of a clip.
The feature could come in handy for videographers willing to re-edit their clips based on their popularity highs and lows.
YouTube, primarily used by millions of individuals to upload personal or copied clips, is also employed by organizations to market their products and services.
More recently, Google added a video upload and sharing service based on YouTube to its Google Apps Premier hosted suite of collaboration and communication applications, which is designed for workplace use.
In early March, a YouTube official told attendees at the eRetailer Summit in Miami that YouTube would soon roll out tools to measure in more detail videos' viewership data.
As promised, a few weeks later Google unveiled YouTube Insight, a tool for YouTube account holders interested in monitoring usage statistics for their clips, such as the geographic locations of viewers.
Hot Spots is part of the YouTube Insight service. "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, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards," wrote YouTube product managers Tracy Chan and Nick Jakobi on Tuesday in an official blog posting.
