[Youtube] subscriber counter/ total view time

[havi05]

📋 Description

Service: Youtube

🔗 Data

-Youtube API (I don't know exactly how)

🎤 Motivation

Maks the information on an internetsite visible to show how "good" the youtube channel is.

[PyvesB]

Hello @Gamemap ! 👋🏻

I believe we can get the number of subscribers to a channel using the following API: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/channels

However, after a quick read through the documentation, I see no way of retrieving a total view time. Could you please have a browse through as well to make sure I haven't missed anything?

[havi05]

Hi,

in the Json list I found this:

"statistics": {
"viewCount": unsigned long,
"subscriberCount": unsigned long, // this value is rounded to three significant figures
"hiddenSubscriberCount": boolean,
"videoCount": unsigned long
},

The tabel says:

statistics.viewCount | The number of times the channel has been viewed.

Is this we are searching for?

Is it possible to add also the total videos count?

statistics.videoCount | The number of public videos uploaded to the channel. Note that the value reflects the count of the > channel's public videos only, even to owners. This behavior is consistent with counts shown on the > YouTube website.

Thank you,
Gamemap

[PyvesB]

statistics.viewCount | The number of times the channel has been viewed.

Is this we are searching for?

Well, not really, that gives us no clue of the total view time for a given channel. Videos in a channel will have different lengths and most users would not watch them in full anyway, so you can't link the number of users who pressed play to a duration.

[havi05]

Is this the time, which is displayed on the Youtube Creators site?

[PyvesB]

Is this the time, which is displayed on the Youtube Creators site?

I wouldn't know for sure, I don't think I've ever used that part of YouTube before.

[havi05]

You find at https://studio.youtube.com the subscribers and the monetization tab shows the viewtime (if you don't have reacht the goal) (I found only this place with viewtime)

[PyvesB]

Okay, so coming back to my initial question, you are confirming that there is no way to retrieve the total view time via the API?

[havi05]

I found this: https://developers.google.com/youtube/reporting/v1/reports/metrics#watch_time_minutes
There you can also find subscribers_gained or other cool statistics.

I don't know if it is possible to add this.

(I found also video statistics https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos#statistics.viewCount)

[PyvesB]

I found this: https://developers.google.com/youtube/reporting/v1/reports/metrics#watch_time_minutes
There you can also find subscribers_gained or other cool statistics.

As far as I can tell, that API is deprecated and there doesn't seem to be an obvious equivalent in the v3 one.

[havi05]

Ok (I am unfortunately not familiar with this)

[PyvesB]

The total subscriber badge can still probably be done though, feel free to submit a pull request. We've got an nice tutorial on how to add badges and you can also leverage the implementation I wrote for the existing Youtube badges. 😉

[havi05]

Thank you for this tutorial but unfortunately I don't have time to learn this at the moment. If you or someone else have the time to code it would be great but there is no hurry.

[PyvesB]

This has now been deployed to production, thanks to @tarun7singh for his contribution! 🍾

[havi05]

Thank you very much!