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Nowruz: Making Sense of YouTube Insight

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, July 28 2009

It took going to the source, but we now have some clarity on how to interpret YouTube's Insight statistics on how popular various videos are in different places in the world, a question that came up when everyone from us to Politico's Ben Smith to the White House tried to use the figures to make the case that President Obama's video to the Iranian people on the Nowruz holiday made an impact inside Iran.

After a tutorial from YouTube's Aaron Zamost, it's clear that Obama's Nowruz video did in fact enjoy a great deal of popularity in the country it was targeting. But interpreting the YouTube Insight map that shows the White House video as "Most Popular" in Iran requires understanding how YouTube thinks of popularity. What YouTube is doing here is using a popularity index that blends two things: the relative popularity ranking of video within a particular country and the pegging of that ranking against that of videos in other countries.

Take the Nowruz video. The YouTube map seen above shows Iran colored dark green and the United States in a slightly lighter shade of green. Those colors come from the fact that the video was very popular in Iran relative to other YouTube videos watched in Iran, and that it was slightly less popular in the United States when ranked against all the other YouTube videos watched in the U.S.

What that means, for example, a video that is ranked the 4th most popular video in the United States is going to be rated less popular there on a YouTube Insight map than one rated 3rd in Iran -- even though it takes far fewer absolute views to gain that level of popularity in Iran, a country of 70 million, than it would in the U.S., a country more than four times the size. (The darker the green out of all the available colors indicates, says Zamost, how popular a particular video is compared to all other videos on YouTube.) That means that how connected to the Internet is compared to the rest of the world doesn't really matter here, since the metric is only relative to other videos watched in that country.

Zamost points out that YouTube Insight's geographic data could be a powerful tool for candidates and campaigns, given that as uploaders of videos they have access to place-based popularity data broken down to the state level. Case in point: Oregon Senate candidate Steve Novick, branded the "YouTube candidate" by the New York Times. The Novick campaign told the Times "We don't know how many people who saw the ads were Oregon voters, as opposed to people in Norway." But YouTube Insight shows that Novick's videos were popular in Oregon -- as well as in California, where Novick might want to hold a few fundraisers next time around.

Of course, even Obama's savvy outreach to the world trembles before the force that is Susan Boyle, a hit around much of the globe:

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