Labels and studios could have access to your YouTube metrics

YouTube Insight really is an amazing free tool. For users who have uploaded content to Google's popular video sharing site, YouTube Insight provides extremely concise metrics for a video's viewership. It includes maps that show where in the world your video has the most viewers, your audience's demographic makeup, and even a second-by-second audience attention metric.

Today, Google announced that YouTube Insight has been tied into YouTube's Content ID, the management tool that lets broadcasters, studios, labels, and individual copyright holders to identify videos uploaded to YouTube containing their intellectual property.

Martin Landers, software engineer for Insight, and Walter Lee, Product Manager of Content ID posted a blog entry on YouTube today stating that every major US content producer is using Content ID now to decide whether they want to block videos, track them, or monetize them.

Now, these companies have access to all the Insight information as well. So if you've posted a video including some major label music in the background for 30 seconds and it has been profiled in Content ID, the label now has access to all your Insight information and can check that half-minute for second-by-second audience engagement.

Lee and Landers cite the viral JK Wedding Entrance Dance video that uses Chris Brown's "Forever" as its foundation, which is now Sony Music's 8th most popular video on YouTube, beating out of more than 1,800 videos the label added to its own channel.

While monetization remains something of a conundrum for YouTube, Insight will give content owners a better look into the power of user-created viral videos and could result in fewer takedowns being issued. Conversely, it could mean that content owners will become more strict, and decide to pull videos down based on their performance and popularity instead of simply for containing copyrighted material.