Hot on the heels of Facebook Inc. opening up more metrics about videos uploaded to its site, Google Inc. is upping the ante with the introduction of reporting functionality for content creators on YouTube. The release marks the latest escalation in what is shaping up as a full-blown feature war between the world’s top video sharing service and the would-be successor to the throne.

Upon clicking the new “Realtime” tab under the YouTube Analytics menu, users are greeted with two graphs, one blue and the other green. The first displays activity over the past 48 hours, breaking down the total number of hits in that period by hour, while the second provides deep visibility into the last 60 minutes. The charts are updated with new views a few minutes after the fact, which is a far cry from the data visualization world’s definition of real-time but represents a major improvement over what YouTube offered before.

The default setting for the dashboard is to only display statistics for the five most recent videos associated with a particular account, but users can also have it show views for earlier videos with some tinkering. Google says that the new Realtime panel is designed to provide early insights into content performance that can help marketers react faster to engagement trends than they would be able to relying on older data.

The release follows Facebook rolling out a view counter that enables members to check how many hits a particular video has received without having to pause and fire up the backend analytics dashboard. Equally significant is the fact that the feature is available for any public post, which means that marketers can check how the competition is doing, see what succeeds in capturing users’ attention and what doesn’t and optimize their own content accordingly.

Facebook announced the counter in conjunction with plans to make the recommended items selection that pops up after a user completes watching a clip available on smartphones and tablets. The company is seeking to capitalize on the fast-growing media appetite of mobile users, who account for more than 65 percent of video views on its network and helped increase its share of peak-hour broadband traffic to 2 percent, according to Sandvine Corp. survey published in May. That’s not all that much compared to YouTube’s 13 percent, but the social networking titan is narrowing the gap with every new feature and enhancement.

Google, however, is not going down without a fight, a fact that its prompt response to Facebook’s hit counter reflects clearly. The new Realtime dashboard is available now for all channels and content owners as well as groups with 5 or fewer videos.

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