YouTube is to begin using the vast pools of information it collects about its users to provide video creators with feedback about how their content is being viewed.

A new feature on the site will let video creators find out in which parts of the world their material has been most popular, and also how popular material has proven at different times in its life cycle.

The information will be most useful to commercial partners and advertisers, who will be able to gain an insight into the way their content is viewed globally and tailor offline product releases and marketing campaigns accordingly, YouTube said.

The information will be available only to the person who has uploaded a video.

Google, which owns YouTube, said that the site would soon also have a feature allowing creators to discover how viewers had come to watch their video - for instance after doing a search on the web or on YouTube itself, by following a link in an e-mail, or by clicking on a video embedded in another website.

A spokesman for the company also said it was working on incorporating other metrics into the feature - raising the prospect, for instance, that creators could see whether their videos were popular with a particular age group, or with women rather than men - but that no such service was planned at this stage.

YouTube invites users to register with the site so that they can rate and comment on videos. During registration, the site collects the user's e-mail address, country of residence, gender and date of birth.

The service being launched today, called YouTube Insight, makes no use of any such personal information, and relies solely on data gathered about the whereabouts of a viewer, known from their IP address, and the time at which they watched a video.

"One way of thinking about YouTube is as one of the world's largest focus groups," Nick Jakobi, a product manager at Google's Zurich office, said. "This service will give marketers and our other partners a greater level of insight into how that focus group is engaging with their videos."

He cited the instance of a film company which could release two different trailers for a film and see which video fared better in order to design a marketing strategy, or a record label which could see in which countries a music clip proved popular, and plan a band's touring schedule accordingly.

Marketers are increasingly aiming to make use of personal information that is gathered by internet companies about their users in order to target advertising more effectively, but privacy campaigners have raised concerns about services that track users' behaviour to gather such information.

Phorm, a controversial UK-based service which has the backing of major internet service providers, works by gathering information about users throughout the entirety of a web browsing and claims to provide more useful data to marketers than data from individual sites.

The service, which has been criticised for invading users' privacy, is now being investigated by the Information Commissioner's Office. Phorm maintains that its technology never uses information in a way that makes individual users personally identifiable.

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