YTCA is a utility to collect stats from one or more YouTube channels. It was designed to collect data related to captioning, but could be extended to support other data collection needs.
- Number of videos
- Total duration of all videos
- Number of videos with captions (does not include YouTube's machine-generated captions)
- Percent of videos that are captioned
- Mean number of views per video
- Number of "high traffic" videos (see High Traffic section below for details)
- Number of high traffic videos that are captioned
- Percent of high traffic videos that are captioned
- Total duration of captioned videos
- Total duration of captioned high traffic videos
In order to prioritize captioning efforts, one may wish to focus on videos that are "high traffic". By default, YTCA considers a video "high traffic" if its number of views is greater than the mean for that channel.
Alternatively, you can define your own high traffic threshold using filters. See the following section for details.
Filters can be used to narrow the output to "high traffic" videos, defined in various of ways using the filtertype and filtervalue parameters, which can be passed to YTCA via the URL. Alternatively default filter settings can be defined in the Configuration block within ytca.php.
Supported values of filtertype are:
- views - limit results to videos that have X or more views
- percentile - limit results to videos that fall into the X percentile for the channel based on views (e.g., the top 10%)
- count - limit results to the top X videos for the channel, based on views
A filtertype parameter must always be accompanied by a a filtervalue parameter, which defines the value of X as used by the filter.
In the following example, videos are limited to those with views greater than 10,000:
ytca.php?filtertype=count&filtervalue=10000
YTCA can limit results to just those videos published within a particular date range. The date-start and date-end parameters can be used independently or together.
In the following example, videos are limited to those published on or after January 1, 2016:
ytca.php?date-start=2016-01-01
In the following example, videos are limited to those published between January 1, 2016 and June 30, 2016:
ytca.php?date-start=2016-01-01&date-end=2016-06-30
YTCA supports the following parameters, which can be passed by URL or made permanent as default values in the Configuration block within ytca.php.
- report - supported values are 'summary' (default; shows summary statistics for all channels) or 'details' (shows statistics for individual videos)
- channels - path to an ini file that identifies all YouTube channels to be included in the analysis. See channels.ini for an example.
- channelid - id of a single YouTube channel. If this parameter is passed, the specified channel will be analyzed instead of channels in the ini file.
- output - format of report; supported values are 'html' (default), 'xml', or 'json'. The latter can be used to generate custom reports or save results to a database (this functionality is not included in the repo).
- filtertype - supported values are 'views', 'percentile', or 'count'. See the preceding section for details.
- filtervalue - the value associated with the chosen filter type. See the preceding section for details.
- date-start - limit results to videos published on or after this date (values must be in the form YYYY-MM-DD, e.g., 2016-01-01)
- date-end - limit results to videos published on or before this date
- timeunit - the unit in which "duration" values are reported. Supported values are 'seconds' (the default), 'minutes', or 'hours'
- title - title of the report. Must be URL-encoded. For example, spaces must be replaced with plus signs (+) and other special characters must be replaced with their UTF-8 codes. See W3Schools URL Encoding Reference for details, including a UTF-8 conversion chart.
- show-channel-id - supported values are 'true' or 'false'. If true, a YouTube Channel ID column is included in the HTML output of summary report. Default is 'false'.
- debug - supported values are 1 or 2. If set to 1, additional data is added to the output for auditing purposes (expected # of videos per channel, number of YouTube API requests, and Google cost (in units)). If set to 2, YouTube API query URLs are displayed in output (HTML output only) so user can inspect raw data directly (useful for troubleshooting). Legacy value of 'true' is supported as a value of 2.
- PHP 5.3 or higher
- A YouTube API key. For more information see the YouTube Data API Reference.
- Define variables in the Configuration block within ytca.php.
- Run it in a browser. Use the URL parameters listed above to fine-tune the output and explore the data.
YouTube channels can be analyzed one channel at a time by passing a channelid parameter via the URL. Multiple channels can be analyzed in a batch by defining them in an ini file such as channels.ini.
The YouTube Channel ID is a 24-character string that starts with the characters "UC". This sometimes appears in the URL for the channel. For example, the URL for the main University of Washington channel is
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgq3uJ5jFCbNB06TC9BFBw
The channel ID is UCJgq3uJ5jFCbNB06TC9BFBw
If the channel URL is not presented in the above form, here's one way to find the channel ID for that channel:
- View source
- Search the source code for the attribute data-channel-external-id
- The value of that attribute is the channel ID
Alternatively, you can substitute the user name for any channel ID. As long as it's a valid user name and is not a 24-character string starting with "UC", YTCA can look up the channel ID without you having to follow the above steps.
For example, here's an alternative URL for accessing the main University of Washington channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/uwhuskies
The user name is uwhuskies
YTCA could analyze this one channel using either of the following URLs:
ytca.php?channelid=uwhuskies
ytca.php?channelid=UCJgq3uJ5jFCbNB06TC9BFBw
Both of these URLs generate the same output, but the former adds overhead because YTCA needs to lookup each unknown channel ID via an extra query to the YouTube Data API.
By default, the output from YTCA is one HTML file containing a table of statistics.
Each row within the table contains summary data for one YouTube channel,
and summary statistics are provided in a summary row at the bottom of the table.
If report=details is passed via the URL, the output contains a separate table for each channel, showing the title, number of views, and duration of each video in the channel, plus a Yes/No field showing whether each video is captioned.
The YouTube Data API has a limit on how many API queries can be executed per day. For additional details, see Quota usage in the API documentation.
Quotas can be estimated using YouTube's Quota Calculator.
As of January 2020, quota costs associated with running this application are:
- 100 units for each channel (search query)
- 5 units for each video
- 3 units for each channel ID lookup from a user name
A typical daily quota is 10,000 units per day for free (higher quotas can be requested for a fee).
With 10,000 units, you could run this application to collect data from 25 channels and 1,500 total videos within those channels.