Whether your YouTube video has 10 views or 10,000,000, people always want to know the same thing: who’s watching this? Where do viewers come from? How did they find my video?

Finally, Youtube has some answers. Today there are releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they have uploaded. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.

How does this help you? Well, using these metrics, you can increase your videos’ view counts and improve your popularity on the site. For instance, you might learn that your videos are most popular on Wednesdays, that you have a huge following in Spain, or that new videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly. With this information, you can concentrate on creating compelling new content that appeals to your target audiences, and post these videos on days you know these viewers are on the site. (Maybe even post your next video in Spanish?) And for those of you who are also partners, the more popular a video is, the more advertising revenue it can generate.

Youtube will be making new features and additional information available fairly quickly — like a specific breakdown of how viewers discovered the video — so keep an eye out as they roll out new features. As for now, you can find currently available metrics by clicking under the “About this Video” button under “My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.”

The YouTube Team