Who's watching?

YouTube has debuted YouTube Insight, a suite of analytic tools that provide audience trends on videos that publishers have uploaded.

YouTube already offers comments, ratings and a ranking for each clip. Insight adds context to where viewers come from and when they watched a given video.

Because publishing a video on YouTube is so simple, the tool may yield opportunities for A/B testing. A studio marketing a movie, for example, could post several trailers appealing to different users, Product Manager Tracy Chan suggested.

The studio could determine the productivity of each video based on geography and time of day. It may find heavy viewership in a specific state — or among an outlying demographic — to which it has done little or no targeted marketing, then decide to direct its attention there.

YouTube had 269 million monthly visitors worldwide in February, up 84 percent from the same month last year, according to comScore.