YouTube today announced updates to the statistics it offers on the videos you publish at the site, giving you the option to make your statistics public:

Uploaders can find even more information about their videos via our free analytics tool, YouTube Insight, including stats about their popularity, geographic audience, and viewer demographics. But most of this information is hidden from the view of the millions and millions of people who’ve never posted a video to the site, and who therefore don’t have access to much of the data we make available to uploaders.

That’s why today we’re giving you the ability to make some information collected in Insight available publicly to anyone watching your videos on YouTube. Now when you watch a video, you can learn even more about it and its audience: on the watch page, under the “Statistics & Data” section, you will be able to see metrics about a video’s views over time, its popularity in different parts of the world, the top drivers of traffic, and the video’s top three audience demographics.

If you’ve uploaded a video, you will be able to choose whether or not you want to make this information public. (You can turn this feature on or off for any or all of the videos you upload, by adjusting the privacy settings for your videos under “My Account.”) But we think that providing your audience with more information about what they’re watching can help you drive views and sustain a more engaged audience. And of course, for those of you who are partners, allowing statistics to be displayed with your videos is actually a great way to attract advertisers.

We hope this feature, like others we’ve launched this year, will help us further open up analytics on the site, making it easy for users to play with YouTube information across different platforms.

YouTube’s statistics announcement is part of a push to get ads on a larger percentage of the user-generated videos on the site.

According to YouTube’s Jonas Yngvessog:

Allowing statistics to be displayed with your videos is actually a great way to attract advertisers. We know that advertisers are looking for partners who have strong views and engaged audiences — we’ve seen popular users like Paul Telner and Chris Bosh leverage YouTube Insight to sign business deals and sponsorships — so we hope this feature will help you demonstrate the value of your content in new, more visible ways.

Advertisers can also use this feature to find videos that match their target audience, or discover new partners and content for previously untapped opportunities.