Today Google announce that content providers on YouTube will get real time analytics form those who watch the video. In TV terms - real time personal ratings!(NYT)

In a move to provide better data to its users, YouTube formally announced late Wednesday that it had added a free feature that will show video creators when and where viewers are watching their videos. With this, the company hopes to turn YouTube from an online video site into a place where marketers can test their messages, Tracy Chan, YouTube product manager, said.

This program, called YouTube Insight, provides a detailed view of a video’s popularity, both over time and geographically, broken down by state. (Internationally, YouTube Insight is not as insightful, providing only popularity by country.)

YouTube has provided basic analytical information to creators of videos since its introduction, including the number of views, the viewers’ ratings of the video, and the number of comments left. Advertisers received a slightly more sophisticated summary.

With the Insight information, video creators can dig into the specifics of a video’s performance and find, for example, that it peaks on Fridays in winter months, or it has taken several weeks to get traction — information that can help better promote their work. The information, presented as a color-coded map and a graph of a video’s popularity, is accessible through a link from a video creator’s account page on YouTube. The company will update the data once a day.

What does this mean? How will this accelerate the shift from traditional to social media?

Next week I will be publishing an interview with Brian Hurlburt who is doing a Sam Walton in local news/publishing in Yarmouth Nova Scotia. Brian has become the most important source of what is going on in a small town. One of the most important tools in Brian’s kit bag is measurement. He can show the local B & B, the church group, the activist group, the tourism folks what kind of traction they are getting on the web. They know exactly who is looking at them and how and why. Of course traditional advertising cannot do this.

Brian’s story I think is at the heart of the shift to come and the YouTube announcement fits into this context.

Brian’s experience is telling him that the money will leave the traditional media once there is only an initial base of people online. They will go to the new, even when the pool is not that large because what is there is so clearly measurable.

For isn’t mass media is really a lottery? Even when you win, you may not know enough about what happened. But with highly measurable new media, you can refine and refine until you get exactly what you want.

Now a small business in a small town can have TV ads. Access to the media itself is cheap. Making the video is cheap. With measurement you can tailor the offering to suit you best. Now even large businesses can have video ads that are fully measurable.

Why would you pay a regular TV station or a local newspaper for an offering that costs so much more and where you have no idea what will happen?

I think that we are going to see a major move here. I think that, just as Craigslist gutted Personals, so measurable web-based media will gut the rest of mass advertising. As the money flows so will the attention and the shift to online will accelerate.

The money will move because of measurement and it will move before the masses move to online. There is less time to respond that conventional TV, Radio and Print think.

This is surely why Google are working so hard on Analytics.