YouTube Insights: Hot Spots

A glimpse at one of YouTube’s analytics tools.

If you poke around in YouTube’s analytics dashboard, called “Insights”, you will find some tasty treats. If the release of these tools was a headline somewhere, I clearly missed it. The image above is a screen capture of the Hot Spots chart for my 4-minute video, “Personal Income Taxes – A Visual Explanation”. Here’s the explanation of the chart.

The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. The higher the graph, the hotter your video: fewer viewers are leaving your video and they may also be rewinding to watch that point in the video again. Audience attention is an overall measure of your video’s ability to retain its audience.

It looks like the video has above-average retention for all but 30 seconds–not too shabby! When I investigated that low point, I discovered that there is a span of about 5 seconds around 1:41 during which the frame is devoid of animation–it does seem like a disappointingly boring point in the video. I should trim out those dead seconds. A handy tool indeed!