Wrangling video stats

A few years ago I was in charge of managing a set of videos that were placed on several internet video sharing sites and also embedded on a couple of blogs.

Boy, did I hate the end of the month. I’d visit each site, whip out a calculator, add up all the views across all the videos on each site manually, write that number down on paper (gross!) and then repeat the process until I had accounted for each place any video I was in charge of was.

After that exercise was done I was exhausted. I didn’t care about much else other than the fact I had the numbers I was seeking in the first place.

When I first started using uStudio to manage and publish I knew that the pain of wrangling all that data would go away. Lo, it did, but there was an unexpected consequence.

Instead of just being relieved that I didn’t have to do this exhaustive manual thing, I found I had the time and energy to ask questions. Questions like, “Why did this video perform better on this site and not on the next?” and “Why does this keyword attract views, but this one doesn’t?”

It allowed me to evolve from simply managing videos to creating a feedback loop that improved how I was producing, describing and where I was publishing my videos.

Making a process efficient makes everyone feel like they’ve saved time. The true benefit is that it allows you to do a better job at what you intended to do in the first place.