When Google paid $1.76 billion for YouTube in October 2006, industry observers all had one question: How would Google extract value out of the world’s biggest user-built video site?

The answer, of course, was advertising. Wednesday, YouTube announced a key technology for building the video advertising business — a video analytics feature called Insight.

YouTube Insight is “a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site,” the company said on a team blog. Uploaders will be able to see how frequently videos are viewed in different parts of the world, “as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time.”

Tracking Performance

Insight also provides, well, insight into how long it takes a video to achieve popularity and how a video behaves after popularity peaks.

The blog post studiously avoids mention of advertisers, except to point out to YouTube partners that “the more popular a video is, the more advertising revenue it can generate.”

The tools “give a lot of context around the performance of video over time, where your audience is coming from, and how your message is connecting to your audience,” YouTube Program Manager Tracy Chan said. “Effectively, YouTube has become an ad-effectiveness, or an insight-effectiveness, tool.”

More Targeted Ads

Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, said the new tool “is important to YouTube advertisers, since it allows them to have more targeted ads. It should help YouTube become even more profitable over time.” The ultimate test, however, will be if YouTube can “really deliver ads in context and around what people are interested in.” If so, YouTube “ends up being a win-win for advertisers and consumers.”

While amateur video-makers will surely appreciate the additional data, the new analytics tool…