Today I have figured out that you can download a lot of statistics about your on videos from Youtube. That is actually very nice since I was always sceptical that you miss the knowledge of who is watching your videos once you do not host them yourself. Unfortunately there are some drawbacks to these statistics:
- Youtube only lets you download statistics for a periode of 30 days. So if you want to download your statistics for an entire year you have to download 12 files.
- Next the statistics are only available as rawdata and you need to process them in order to receive some useful information.
For me and in legend these statistics are very interesting for three reasons:
- We want to figure out from which websites people come to youtube in order to watch our video. This is important for us so we can contact the webmasters of theses sites as soon as new videos are available.
- We want to to analyze if the user behaviour is influenced by our Youtube ballads n bullets dvd and if so we want to see weather the influence is actually positive (which we of course expect).
- We want to see from which videos our video is linked as a related video. This could enable us to have some really useful collaborations.
Since there are so many reasons to process the statistics I wrote a little python script in order to analyze the statistics and retrieve them in a human readable format. Because open source is really important for our society and the web I made the decission to share this little tool with everyone on the web under a GPL licence (which means you can use it for free!).
So feel free to download this little python script and run it on your website. It is also avail able in the google code svn repository
Screencast and instructions:
Since the script is only displaying some information there is almost no configuration to be done. But I know from the time when my programming skills were not as good as today that it was always hard to run the source code of someone else. To make it even easier for you I created a little screencast that explains you how to download the programm, How to download the statistics from youtube and how to run the statistics tool.
Oh by the way this is some background knowledge about youtube insights can be found at the official youtube data api documentation
I hope you like that tool. If you find some bugs or you have some suggestions I would be more than happy to hear from you about your thoughts!