YouTube’s New Real-Time Analytics Offers Minute-By-Minute Video View Count

YouTube today announced a major upgrade to its analytics dashboard that will provide video publishers a minute-by-minute look at how many people are watching their videos.

It’s a long-awaited addition that will be very welcome to YouTube publishers accustomed to anything but real-time statistics about video views. For years, YouTube analytics have been opaque about how many people were watching in the early hours after publishing.

The new dashboard shows estimated real-time viewership data for a content owner or channel’s last five published videos in two charts, minute-by-minute for the last 60 minutes and hour-by-hour for a sliding window of the last 48 hours. YouTube’s support page on the new feature said the data is also available when looking at reports for individual videos. Further:

There is a latency of a few minutes between the occurrence of the view and its display in the report; data is then automatically updating, without the need to refresh the page. The “current” hour bar is highlighted to stress that the hour is still incomplete. Realtime data is estimated and meant to provide general guidance on potential view activity on your videos. This approximate character of the numbers is also shown in the rounding off to two significant digits.