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Comment by dopamean | Hacker News Reader

I dont know why I was so naive to think that all these youtube stars just repped themselves and it was all very... home grown if you will.

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The vast majority do rep themselves. Only the top talent are catered to by the MCNs like Maker.

Then why would a small YouTube star want to join an MCN? The studios do still tend to provide a support structure and tech stack to help you grow your channel. Generally speaking, of course -- there are a lot of MCNs out there and each one operates differently.

It's weird seeing comments from anyone who knows the YouTube world on HN.

Did you reverse engineer annotations?

Yes, I worked on a reverse-engineered annotations project at some point in time, among other things. The YT space is definitely under-represented here, though I can't say I'm surprised. All the related startups are hybrid tech and media companies who tend to do (public) business more like media companies than tech companies.

I also attended Playlist Live last year (or the year before? I forget). Nice to talk to you Kevin :)

That's cool, I was peeking through your company's portfolio and saw the Fullscreen stuff. When George showed me that I was pretty impressed, couldn't figure out how it was done.

Awesome, same!

It is weird to see comments from fellow YT API hackers. Great to see y'all on here.

Here is something I hacked together with some fellow HN lurkers, in case the YT API stuff tickles your fancy: youstars.herokuapp.com/#/michellephan (using Michelle Phan's channel just as an example since it looks good).

Doesn't do anything too complex with the API, mostly just using the custom YT player. I checked out your user profile and your company. Great to see people doing stuff with YT analytics. It's something I've worked a lot with myself.

That looks great! Have you considered releasing it to the wild? Are the channels on the right MichelePhan's featured/favorited channels?

Thanks - glad you liked it. We've considered releasing it into the wild. Mostly it was just a fun hack project. Maybe we will do a blog post or something and show people in a bigger scale. The channels on the right are related to the Michelle Phan channel. One of the back end devs cooked up a channel matching feature. Actually if you click the left menu for suggestions (and you are oauthed), he wrote several selection metrics based on your account that will make other discovery suggestions. It's actually a really neat feature.

Hey, I'm a day late I know but just saying hi also as I'm also in the youtube world. I'm the creator of SocialBlade.com (youtube/etc stats site) & we have a contract with Maker... or I guess now Disney to refer people into their MCN through our site. Just catching up on HN now after being at Playlist Live this past weekend.

Most of them do, even if their channel is "claimed" into a multi-channel network's account.

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