YouTube launched YouTube Insight earlier this week. It’s a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos they upload to the site. This means that uploaders (creatives, producers, directors, and aspiring Steven Spielberg’s) can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in a market at any given time.

Apparently YouTube has been gathering this data for some time now, as even videos that were uploaded last year have viewing statistics and geographic data attached.

This is a big move for Google, YouTube’s parent company. Ever since they purchased the video giant for a gazillion dollars last year, people have been wondering how they’re going to make money off the deal. Sure, there’s Adwords, but that clearly wasn’t enough to support the infrastructure costs and bandwidth needs of the online video behemoth.

YouTube Insight sets the stage for Google to really provide tangible services for big agency creatives and big media alike. It answers the question all the analysts were wondering - how is Google going to make money off online video?

By offering analytics data around who’s viewing what videos and where they’re at, media producers will now be able to utilize this service as a testing platform for ideas and strategies before forking over enormous amounts of $$ to traditional media outlets. Creative types will likely flock to this service and will pay for insight into what users are watching their ideas on the small screen to flesh out what works and what doesn’t.

See the story @ The YouTube Blog