YouTube Insight provides detailed information regarding use of the videos you post to the site.   It shows how many times your videos were viewed, how long people are staying on the videos and which site has deemed your video worthy enough to embed it into their site.   I use this tool weekly to gain an understanding of the audience that is viewing our videos and to help make decisions about what type of videos to make in the future.

One of the reports within Insight called “Demographics” has been very interesting to me.   When YouTube users create an account on do they really enter their age?   I never use my real age or birth date when I create accounts on Web sites, I want to have some privacy and retain some ownership of my personal information (if only in a small way) so how accurate is this chart really?

But what does this chart actually tell me.   Let’s look at it a little closer.

In order for YouTube to gain this information a user must be logged in.  By that token we would have to assume that males 35-54 are more likely to be logged into their YouTube account than females are.  (Guys, do they know something we don’t ).

Missing Key Metric
The missing metric?   Anonymous users.  How many people viewed my videos anonymously?   What percentage of entire use is this demographic really based on? How many people are actually logged into YouTube accounts when viewing videos?

Until YouTube provides this anonymous use information I will treat demographic information on their Insight tool with a bias, knowing that it isn’t accurate and only really represents a smaller audience than it should.