YouTube just made its video analytics tool generally available. For the first time, the uploader of a YouTube video can get a country by country breakdown of where the views occurred, with data stretching back to November 2007. Here's stats for a clip we uploaded.

While this data will appeal hugely to marketers, its availability could in fact make YouTube less important in the video marketing mix, as the value of a YouTube hit can now be seen to be considerably lower than many may have assumed, at least for marketing campaigns that are less than global in scope.

We reckon a lot of UK marketers with YouTube hits on their hands are in for a rude shock - assuming they can get access to the data from their agencies. A million views in the US, India or China ain't worth a lot when you're marketing a product into UK or European markets.

The improved transparency may also cause a shakeout among low integrity seeding outfits. Until now, they could drive cheap views from literally anywhere and no one would be any the wiser. Now, they're going to have to figure out how to get a European viral in front of a European audience.

Billed as the most expensive ad campaign in the 80-year marketing history of the brand, Guinness's Tipping Point ad was part of an overall £10 million campaign. With echoes of the 2003 Honda cog campaign, the Guinness spot follows grandfather clocks, cellos, and flaming bales of hay as they fall like dominoes through sun-kissed streets in rural Argentina. The ad culminates with the creation of a giant pint of Guinness in the village square, a totemic, quasi-religious centre-piece, flanked by a crowd of bronzed and cheering villagers, rallying around the Guinness brand. The overall effect is as hale and wholesome as...well, as a pint of Guinness, I guess.

'Tipping Pot' - The Pot Noodle ad that launched on the Unruly Network yesterday - injects a shot of reality into the concept. No high altitude Argentinian village here - just the dizzy heights of tower blocks on a council estate in Kilburn. Forget the cellos and the hard-backed books - Pot Noodle brings you Silk Cut cigs and mobiles from the last millenium, abandoned shopping trolleys and knackered pushchairs. And no smiling villagers either- unless you include the guy in the lift who's having a slash (in the time-honoured tradition of the tower block) or the gasping blow-up doll who brings the ad to a funny, fitting climax.

The Guinness ad is a glorious piece of escapist eye-candy, but the thing that I like about Pot Noodle is that it doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. So what if Pot Noodle is junk food scoffed by students in bedsits and strung-out mums on council estates? There ain't no shame in that.

First things first - apologies that it's been such a long time since the last post. My New Year's Resolution is to use the blog more effectively to keep you all in touch with developments at Unruly Media, so here we go!

2008 has got off to a pretty busy start, with videos for Nike, MTV, the Supebad dvd, and a neat Kwari Gameplay demonstration all going live on the system in the last week or two. There's a Lynx campaign going live today, too, which is well worth checking out. We should have some more pan-European campaigns up and running soon - you'll get an email when a campaign goes live in your territory so you won't miss out on anything.

We've released some cool new publisher features over the last few weeks, including improved reporting metrics, so for each campaign you can now track the number of video plays on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. We've also released the functionality for running multiple sites per publisher account, which will make things easier for those of you running videos across several sites. The new 160 video unit, designed for blog sidebars, has also been released, and has been a big hit with bloggers so far :-). And this week, you'll see a new column appear on your stats page, showing you the effective CPM for each campaign you're running.

The only thing to say is, please keep telling us which features and improvements you'd like to see on the system; your feedback drives development and is incredibly helpful as we work to evolve and improve the product.

Lots of people have asked for this and we've added support for the three video sizes that have been most frequently requested. These are:

• 300 x 250 pixels - will fit in an IAB standard MPU ad placement
• 336 x 280 pixels - the same size as the 'Large Rectangle' format in Google's AdSense program
• 600 x 520 pixels - some sites just want it large!

If there's a size you want that we don't currently provide, please let us know in the comments, below. (Note: we've had lots of publishers asking for video units small enough to fit in a standard blog sidebar - about 180 pixels wide. We're deliberately not supporting video units this small at the moment, as it's too small for most advertisers to be happy with. One possibility is we make some sort of 180 pixel wide blog widget available that will, when clicked, open up a larger video player in a JavaScript window...if that sounds good, let us know).

This is priceless. If you haven't seen Dragos and Marek's Pro Street Romania site yet, you're missing a trick. They've dedicated their lives to the noble pursuit of high-speed road car racing. Check out this footage from the fanboys. The best bit in my book is the starting gun.

These were the most blogged about Blair videos of all time as he announced the date of his departure, at 12.12 GMT, on 10 May 2007.

1. Tony Blair Meets Catherine Tate (FULL SKETCH) Comic Relief
2. Tony Blair félicite Nicolas Sarkozy (en français)
3. Should I stay or should I go Rx2008
4. Bush Blair Endless Love
5. Bush and Blair at the gay bar

Hmm...two officially sanctioned but somewhat humorous clips, three homemade satirical montages...perhaps not quite what he was hoping for. It'll be interesting to see how this list changes over the next 24 hours as bloggers decide which clips to use to accompany the announcement of Blair's resignation date.

Variously described as a prime example of Third Wave Feminism, the sexiest girl band on the planet and the worst commercial campaign ever, our favourite response to this piece is "+5 stars for an accurate rendition of the internal anatomy of the human cerebelum".

We've just done a complete overhaul of the machinery behind the Viral Video Chart. We're now updating all chart data every 15 minutes so you'll see things zooming up and down the top 20 during the day. This means we'll catch breaking videos much faster. Previously we were publishing static data that was frozen at midnight and we didn't update stuff til the following midnight - way too slow!!!

We've also done some major improvements that'll speed up chart generation, allowing  us to publish lots more charts for interesting types of video content. More soon.

One unforeseen consequence is that we've fucked up our ability to show movement  up / down compared to the previous day. That's why all the arrows have disappeared. Oops.

This anti-PS3 video is very good. Slick, malicious, funny and enough truth to wound. We picked it up in our top 20 global videos on Sunday, just 4 days after it was uploaded to YouTube.   A few days later, it's been all over the blogosphere (Note to Sony: have you any idea just how influential some of those blogs are?), it's clocked up 300,000 views and nearly two thousand edgy comments, and it's apparently been making some waves down at Sony's HQ this afternoon.

If I were Sony, I'd hire a talented comic singer-song writer and a good videographer to come up with a response. And fast. I mean, the target's Microsoft, for pete's sake, how hard can it be? Make a spoof advert for their new combined gaming-console-cum-cell-phone.  Or something.

Oh, and I'd also buy the keyword "PS3 Song" on AdWords and do something smart with it. These surely aren't the search results Sony wants us to see. Tell me how great you are. Laugh about the clip. Offer me a discount if I do something. But for god's sake, don't sit their paralysed, giving me radio silence and pretend like it's not happening.

Hey, you know what. Screw making a response piece. Just post and promote this video of Steve Ballmer screaming and dancing like a monkey everywhere. Once the sweaty balding mania has got inside your head, it's very hard to dislodge, and very hard to buy Microsoft again.  That would take seconds to execute and cost no more than a few hundred dollars.

No. 6 in the chart today and yesterday, but only 40,000 views so far, we predict this is going to get bigger.

*Update*

The original video was blogged over 600 times and did I think hit a million views before it got pulled. I've changed the embed code to a reposted version of the video, which is currently on about 60,000 views.