When you research another channel, you're working only with public data. Knowing exactly what is public — and what isn't — keeps your conclusions honest.
On this page
Available publicly (via the YouTube Data API)
- Channel: subscriber count (rounded to 3 significant figures, and hideable by the owner), total views, video count, creation date, country if set.
- Video: view count, like count (if not hidden), comment count (if comments are enabled), duration, publish date, title, description and tags.
Not public
- Impressions and impressions click-through rate
- Watch time and average view duration
- Traffic sources, audience demographics and returning viewers
- Revenue, RPM and CPM
- Dislike counts
Useful descriptive metrics you can derive
Several useful numbers can be calculated from public data, as long as they're labelled as derived: uploads per week, median views of recent uploads (more robust to one viral video than the average), views per day since publishing, and like or comment rate per view.
Why history matters
The API returns current totals only — not history. To see growth you need to record snapshots over time. A tracker that has stored one snapshot can show one data point; anything else would be an estimate presented as data.
OnlineToolPro Editorial Team
Builds and tests the tools on this site
The team behind OnlineToolPro. We write guides from building and testing these tools, and check platform rules against official documentation such as YouTube Help. When something changes, we update the article and its date.