In a move that’s been a long time coming, YouTube have finally released a video analytics tool for all users of the site. The statistics tool lets users see the number of views their video has received and where in the world these views come from for a given date range. The look and feel of the stats package should be very similar to anyone currently using Google Analytics.

While YouTube is a fantastic platform for hosting and distributing online video, I’ve always felt it lacked the kind of reporting that you would get from hosting the video yourself. The new analytics tool should help to solve some of these issues.

While the analytics tool is only new, the stats themselves go back quite a while, for one of my earlier videos the stats go back to the 1st of April 2007.

I’ve taken some screenshots below:

Views by Country:

Popularity:

These basic stats should help online business and marketers understand where their videos are popular and how their number of views changes over time. While I would love to see some more in-depth stats like average drop off points and abandonment rates, I think this is a great start for YouTube.

If you want to see stats for your video, try clicking on the “About this Video” button under “My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.” As always you can let us know what you think by leaving a blog comment below!