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Comment by djtango | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that anything like this exists. I considered what it might be like to build some analytics for something like YouTube but figured that I would be killed or copied by YouTube the second the project got any traction

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> would be killed or copied by YouTube the second the project got any traction

Why? For Youtube there is little money to be made from a tool like this. The target customers for tools like this are advertisers that interact directly with creators. E.g. that's also what nindo.de, a similar platform in the German social media space, built by a popular Youtuber pivoted to.

Those advertisers could be interacting directly with Youtube, but these platforms help them skip over the middleman and go right to the creator.

In theory yes, but in practice not really. AFAIK Youtube doesn't offer a platform to do direct placements with creators, which make up the bulk of creator earnings (basically every big channel is only profitable via those). That Youtube hasn't built out a platform with tools to enable that, so that they could get a piece of that pie is entirely on them.

I feel like even mid-roll ads are just too different type of advertising medium than a direct video integration so they shouldn't be thought of as alternatives to each other. And it would seem to me that the general vibe is that sponsor spots are more hip and more prestigious for advertisers. I used to see those from new and agile companies whereas any sort of normal in-stream ad type would be preferred by more established and classical companies. I use both uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock these days though so my anecdata might be stale.

Once upon a time YouTube barred creators from talking about how much they made. Over time they have also taken steps to hide the numbers. They seem to have shifted and gotten comfortable with it, but personally I would also be hesitant about putting in the resources to build a YT analytics platform.

There are a ton of these.

Why would be killed? It's public information (number of views). Because it might involve scraping?

SocialBlade has existed for years without issue.

Is it likely that Mr Beast negotiated some kind of access to data with YouTube? He has the pull to do that.

Why would he have any pull to make Youtube do anything? What's he gonna do if Youtube refuses, stop using Youtube? He needs them much more than they need him.

There is nothing special here in terms of data. I've worked with the Youtube API before and basically everything that's displayed on this website is easily available there (as long as you snapshot it, which it looks like they started doing in October this year).

I think the only thing they are doing here that I haven't seen on any competitors website is the differentiation between shorts and normal videos. Last time I checked, there was no reliable way to detect whether a video is a short via the API, so you either have to build ugly heuristics for it or build a scraper that tries to access the video as a short. I think this might be quite valuable as the introductions of shorts has disturbed view numbers and accordingly channel/audience valuations quite a bit.

Per-video analytics are also not something that's freely available on competitor platforms IIRC.

> there was no reliable way to detect whether a video is a short via the API

Correct. This is what they say

We use a combination of channel performance along with detailed video performance history to break down longs versus shorts. If you'd like to learn more, please contact our team at...

https://www.viewstats.com/faq

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