After YouTube added the new 'annotations' feature last week, letting you add texts and define clickable spots inside your movie, it now comes up with a cool new feature: 'hot spot insights'.
Launched in March 2008, 'YouTube Insight' gives you detailed analytics on how your movies are doing in regard to number of views, popularity, discovery and demographics. But today, Google (the company behind YouTube) announced a more fine-grained metric: 'hot spots'. This new feature displays the "interest rate" of viewers in any publisher's video on a second-by-second scale. In other words: for every second in your movie, YouTube calculates how 'hot' or 'cold' it is perceived by comparing your video's abandonment rate at that moment to other
videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about
rewinds and fast-forwards. And all this data is displayed in a nice graph next to your video as it plays.
With this new feature, we'll be able to learn something about the specifics of our content, rather than just the general demographics, which is pretty cool. An obvious use would of course be to test the effectiveness of ads by tracking the viewers' attention. But also for eg presentations it could be a great help in shaping your content and getting your message across the best way possible.
P.S. At the time of this writing, the hot spot tab didn't appear on my YouTube Insights dashboard yet 
. So either they launched it in a limited beta, or they announced it a little before time...
