YouTube is giving video creators a deeper look at the viewing trends of the videos the publish on the site. From the Official Google Blog:
…uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.
I think this is a critical step forward in evaluating the ROI on video in general, but especially real estate video. The geographic statistics alone are worth their weight in gold; you can now see where people who are watching your videos are coming from.
Video is an emerging medium in real estate – one that I’m convinced will gain greater and greater traction over the coming months/years.
Contests like the one that Century 21 is hosting (see Century 21 Puts Open Houses in Youtube) or the one that ActiveRain is holding (see ActiveRain Video Contest – best prize yet, I promise) serve to introduce real estate professionals to the power of video on the web. Many will try their hand at video, and many more will certainly be put off by the production effort required – but I believe it will become an essential tool in a Realtor’s arsenal whether they are producing the videos themselves, or outsourcing to a third party.
At the REtech South conference in Atlanta today video is a hot topic of discussion (The Real Estate Bloggers has a great run down of the conversation) – and it’s one that will surely come up at future events (like Connect, natch) as well.
I’ve written before about how you can integrate video into your real estate marketing strategy (see Why Having Real Estate Video Distribution Strategy Matters or Creating a Real Estate Video Channel on YouTube) but a missing piece of the puzzle to date was the ability to evaluate and measure how your videos were being consumed beyond the simple number of views. Previously, you had to rely on web sites like TubeMogul.com to get that information (still a great tool though).
I’m definitely encouraged by this step Youtube has taken and look forward to experimenting with the new Insight.
