Google's YouTube gains video programming intel; Nielsen cringes

Was YouTube really worth $1.65 billion to Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) when the world's largest search company bought it a few years ago? By today's standards, that now seems like a bargain. Consider Yahoo! Inc.'s (NASDAQ: YHOO) impending purchase by Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Microsoft's "small" stake in Facebook that values the social networking site at $15 billion.

YouTube is probably one of the most-used sites I see from friends and family these days. Hours upon hours can be wasted navigating through all the content there, and now that YouTube has launched its YouTube Insight tracking tool, the equivalent of viewership tracking is now available to those who upload videos to the site.

Imagine being able to see details like when, where and how often your videos are being viewed. Previously only available to advertisers at YouTube, all YouTube video uploaders can now see this kind of information. To those who think web surfing time may be eating into television-viewing time, this should provide more detail on whether this is actually happening. Nielsen, eat your heart out.

Professionals and amateurs alike will now be able to test the popularity of different kinds of content at different parts of the days across different parts of each country to make the content as customized as possible. This is what Google is famous for -- relevancy. No blanket ads here -- the company wants its YouTube users to become more successful, which in turns makes it more successful. Rack up another content relevancy win for Google here.