As we continue to collect information about music videos and expand our database, we're starting to do some more things with the data we have. To start it off in 2013, today we're launching a beta of our new Social Tracker. You can find it on evey video page, just scroll down until you see the graph and social data.
One major way music videos get spread on the internet is by being shared on social media sites. While one person may post their favorite video on Facebook, someone else may post it on Google+ or Reddit.
The Social Tracker tracks and aggregates those sharing numbers over time. Every day we get a snapshot of how popular a video is throughout the internet, and we can track that over time.
To start off, we're launching our very basic graph and current totals for the social numbers that we are tracking. We track the shares through the top sites to share content, and we also track granular Facebook data.
We are tracking this data using the actual YouTube and Vimeo sources, so if you see a popular video on the site that has low social numbers, it may be because we only have a lesser known version of the video in the database. Click "Add Information" and "Alternative Source" to add a new source. For videos with more than one source, we are adding the share numbers together.
We started tracking data on January 3rd, and we will adding more and more data tracking points along the way. We're excited with what we can do with this information as well, and many features that are soon to be released will use this social data.
