I was sitting in the lab, getting read to get down to some serious data entry for my poster (I am graphing each of my p4 video‘s popularity statistics on top of the others, see here for more on that) and I thought I was going to have to move the little dot on YouTube’s data aggregator across the fields and manually input each data point. Then I noticed a little button near the bottom. It said “Download reports for this video: csv”. Hallelujah! I am now on the IMF website reading up on csv document format. I am so glad YouTube took care of my data entry!
Apparently this is new as of today.
Super neat!
[PS: if you have no idea what research I am doing, go here!]
I will report more once I’ve figured it out.
UPDATE 1:
When I set the time-range of my Insight to 6 months, it only downloaded March. I was worried March was the only one that would be availible, but it seems that I can download data by month. yay!
UPDATE 2: weirdly, I cannot set my time-range starting or ending on a weekend. A moralistic comment on the evil of doing work on weekends perhaps?
UPDATE 3: I guess I cannot get that data. The alt-text for the csv link (which I have just read) tells me that “Reports can be a maximum of 31 days and can not contain data from before the 1st of March 2009”. (“can not” is sic). Well. That is unhelpful. At least I don’t have to do data entry for the last month and a half of views…
Since I cannot download all of the videos’ individual data at once, and cannot even download all of it at a time, this will be less helpful of a tool than I had supposed. *sigh*.
Inspirational Quote:
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the and the blind can see. —Mark Twain
