YouTube Now Has ‘Realtime’ Stats for Your Videos

Good things come to those who wait, unless you’re dying to know how well that video you just uploaded is doing on social media. YouTube has just rolled out realtime reporting on its analytics dashboard, the latest tool to help creators find their audience. “It’s a part of us working to give channels more real-time data so that they can make more informed decisions,” a Google spokesperson tells Billboard.

Clicking on “Analytics” from your video manager still takes you to a general overview of its performance, showing view counts, minutes watched, levels of engagements (likes, dislikes, comments, etc) and demographics. But now you’ll see a secondary option, Realtime, that when accessed gives you a valuable snapshot of your vid’s performance at that very moment.

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The super simple report is split in two; on one side you have the view count for the last 48 hours, showing the peaks and valleys that come with viewership over that time span. This hour-by-hour data is based on a sliding window of two days. It’s the other graph that will likely have you coming back, though, as it shows activity over the previous 60 minutes. YouTube creators will find these stats incredibly helpful in that the report gives early insights on a video’s performance and can be used to adjust how the video is being promoted.

Both graphs refer to the time zone of the viewer, and YouTube allows that there’s a lag of a few minutes between the actual view and its display in the report, which updates automatically without a need to refresh the page.

Data-hungry creators have the option of viewing reports at the channel level, where they can see a vertical view count of their last five videos. Similarly, content owners can also view data from the last five published videos, and if your video group contains five or less videos, realtime data is also shown. Realtime data for assets, playlists or shows is not yet available. 

Google plans on adding more features to realtime reports in the future.