Youtube recently allowed publishers to make their videos’ data public. This new feature is meant to facilitate connections between content creators and advertisers.
But advertisers and professional content creators are just a small chunk of the Youtube audience, even though they greatly contribute to the vibrant community of the Google-owned video network. How else can public data be interesting?
This is the data for the video “How-to Auto-Retweet Entries On Twitter – Twitter hack:
The first thing I find interesting is to see that traffic coming from suggested related videos. One came from “How to create an auto-retweet bot“, and the second one from the now obsolete video “How-to Let Google Maps Find You“. Getting to know which related videos were clicked is so much more insightful than just seeing a list of related videos. It allows other video creators to better fine-tune their in-Youtube SEO strategy, and appear on pages where clicks are most likely to happen.
The second thing I like is the fair number of views that comes from search. Here, we can see that 80 clicks came from search engines. If you usually pay for those clicks, then you can start to see how a video SEM strategy can help save money overtime.
The third thing, still related to video SEM, is that usually, the life-span of a video online is really short, and follows a bell-curved growth that doesn’t last more than a few weeks. With the way I index my content, you can see that this video has a steady and ongoing growth. It is the same for most videos I produce. The trick is to have a keyword strategy even before you start producing the video. That’s video SEM!
Finally, opening data publicly is also a way for video creators like me to more easily access those numbers, and it sometimes leads to interesting findings: On the “How-to let Google Maps Find You” video mentioned above, the videos got found through unusual keywords from search:
The data highlighted shows that Google finds this video fit to appear on search results for auto retweet! Not only this, but it seems to be an appropriate choice since people click on it! For a video SEM pro like me, this is juicy data: It is a hint on how Youtube powers the Google Search results: If I type auto retweet in Google Search, it will suggest a video that people liked after they watched a video about auto retweet.