At first, I thought YouTube team has invented something like this but for videos (HeatMaps):

At least the name of the feature gave me a similar hint.
It seems YouTube team has finally released an equivalent to Bounce Rate indicator (available in Google Analytics) but for videos:

I was puzzled by the graph and by the feature. The text at the top doesn’t bring much clarity:
The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. Above the average line, your video is hot: it’s retaining more viewers than average and they may be rewinding to watch that point again. Below the average line, your video’s gone cold: viewers are not rewinding or may be leaving the video faster than the average.

The easier way to understand this, is to understand the Bounce Rate first: it’s a way to measure the drop-out rate for any website. Bounce Rate of 75% means that 75% of people left the website after viewing the single first page on that website.
YouTube HotSpot graph shows the percentage of people that left the video at any given moment of time comparing to other videos (of similar length).

How does this help YouTube authors?

For the majority of the ones who post amateur cellphone “streetracing” videos it doesn’t mean anything.
Some of us who care about the effectiveness of what we do this is a great tool to analyse the user reaction on the video and correct any mistakes to make users watch our video until the end. Correcting mistakes is still very difficult because there is no way to replace the video. If you understand that your video needs to be improved to reduce the drop-out rate, you will have to delete the current video and upload a new version. This can be very negative:

• All references to your old version will be broken (e.g. you old video that is embedded at third-party websites will be broken)
• The old version (older than 2 months) was indexed. You will lose all your precious traffic for at least two months until your new version gets into the Google indexes properly
• Moreover, just like with everything else related to optimization, improving the video takes a lot of testing and means you’re likely to re-upload more than once

Wouldn’t it be great if YouTube had a function to replace the video file without losing the indexed page, the references and links?

By the way, the graph at the beginning of the post is real. What do you think it shows?
I interpret it this way: The video is effective and keeps users engaged until the end of the video. The “below average” chunk at the beginning shows that irrelevant viewers are filtered out right away (they understand this video is not interesting for them and leave).

I am sure there’s more to come on the YouTube Analytics front, so stay tuned!

Related links:

• Hot Spot announcement on Official Google Blog

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Several folks have indicated that the speech recognition algorithms currently used by Google are not unique and can lead to some embarrassing moments BUT this is where I think the recently announced Closed Captions feature of YouTube will come into play.
If you know a little about the insides of the speech recognition and translation algorithms (one can argue they are the same if looked at from machine point of view) you will definitely know that the most advanced algorithms use the learning technique (Google Translation service as an example). This is when two sets of data representing the same thing are fed into the algorithm (e.g. same text in English and Spanish) and the algorithm improves upon itself with every new set of data that it gets based on the learnings from that dataset comparison.
Speech recognition and Closed Captions is exactly what Google needs as two corresponding sets of data that can be used to improve the speech recognition quality!
By providing Closed Captions for your YouTube video you will also help Google to correctly transcribe every single word in your video.
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1. Add support for Gmail and Google passwords stored in new Firefox 3. It looks like Firefox password manager changed storage location every time the new version was released
2. Add support for Google Calendar Synch
3. IE6: there’s no need to update the algorithm for the new Internet Explorer 6. The current algorithm recovers these without a problem

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Changing Facebook password is very simple. Below are 5 simple steps to change my Facebook password (your Facebook password). If you don’t want to read, scroll down to watch the Change Facebook Password How-to video.

1. Start on www.facebook.com
2. Login with your current password
3. On the next page click on the “account” link in the top right hand corner:
4. Click on the “change” link in the Password section on the new Edit Account page that you will see.
5. You will be asked to type in your old Facebook password and then type in your new Facebook password twice. Click on “Change Password” button once you’re done entering old and new Facebook passwords

Here’s the video: go to Facebook, change password:

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What does this mean for Video SEO?

I have seen a few blog posts on how to “create your own how-to videos” that recommend adding at least a soundtrack to your video if you’re shy to narrate it.
Well, now there is another reason that will make you want to add the speech to your video. Sooner or later, the YouTube speech recognition spider will start going further than Politician channels. Your videos are next and guess what? The text that will be recognized inside your video will for sure benefit your rankings provided of course that the speech inside is relevant to the subject that you’re optimising for.

Google is slowly building an alternative to old-fashioned text-based website indexing. Annotations are added, speech-to-text recognition is coming anytime soon. What’s next?

Update 18 Sept 2008: As predicted, couple of days back Google announced audio search service called GAudi based on the speech recognition technologies. There is a good discussion point about this new service at ReelSEO.

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