YouTube Experimenting With New Features For Analytics Research Tab

Based on the success of YouTube Search Insights, a keyword research feature released last year, the video-sharing platform is experimenting with three new features on the Analytics Research tab.

The new features, Watch Interest, Watch Activity and Personalized Insights are intended to help content creators identify areas of interest to their audience.

This announcement came via video on YouTube’s Creator Insider channel, which launched in 2017 to provide weekly updates from the site’s creator tech team.

New Features Expand Upon Content Development Insights

Search Insights was launched with the goal of helping creators develop content around potential topics of interest for their audience. It received a positive response, with “80% of the creators in the experiment expressing satisfaction with the tool,” according to Pierce Vollucci, YouTube Senior Product Manager in the video.

While YouTube has YouTube has been working on expanding the feature to include more languages and markets, Search Insights currently only provides information about what viewers are searching for.

The new features announced, Watch Interest, Watch Activity and Personalized Insights, will help content creators find new and related areas that might interest their viewers.

Watch Interest is intended to help content creators identify top, rising or recent videos within a topic. This is intended to allow them to capitalize on current trending topics and videos.

Watch Activity will show what types of content a creator’s audience is viewing. This can be used to gauge interest in related types of content.

Personalized Insights will be customized to the creator’s channel, providing insights into their audience’s unique interests or their saved videos. The save feature, which was initially only available on desktop but is now in the mobile app as well, uses this as a signal of interests.

“Creators often get inspired by videos in adjacent niches, so we highlight relevant topics or areas adjacent to your current content,” Vollucci said in the video.

New Features Are Just Beginning of Planned Improvements

YouTube remains forward-looking in its approach to analytics and is continuously seeking new ways to assist content creators. If this new features experiment is successful like the previous Search Insights update, YouTube will seek to roll it out to a wider audience.

“These are just some of the improvements we’re thinking about with regard to the future of content research,” Vollucci said in the video. “We’re hoping to run this experiment for a limited time, collect all your feedback and bring the feature back to a broader set of creators.”

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