YouTube Research Toolkit von Christian Nwodo

Free YouTube niche research, on the page you are already looking at. There is
no account to create and no subscription to buy.

Nothing is held back behind a sign-up or an upgrade prompt. Install it and
everything described below works straight away, for as long as you use it.

FIND THE CHANNELS YOU ARE COMPETING WITH

Open any channel and a Similar Channels tab lists the ones like it, ranked by
how closely they match. Each row shows how large the channel is, how many
views its videos average, how far it reaches past its own subscriber count,
how often it posts, how old it is and when it last uploaded.

Sort by any of those, or narrow the list to the channels worth finding:
the ones overperforming their size, the ones with small followings and large
view counts, the recent arrivals already doing big numbers, or simply
everything smaller than the channel you are on.

That last one is the point of the whole thing. A search shows you the biggest
channels in a subject. This shows you the ones just below them, including
channels with a few hundred subscribers that no search result would ever
surface.

TURN A SEARCH INTO A SHORTLIST

Search YouTube for a subject and scroll as far as you care to. The Filter
button in the header then takes everything the page has loaded and lets you
narrow it down. Set a range for how many subscribers a channel has or how
many views a video got, choose how recently it went up, or keep only long
form or only shorts. Sort by whichever of those matters.

YouTube cannot sort its own results by how big a channel is, or by how a video
did against that channel's average. This can, and it does it instantly,
because every figure was already on the page.

READ A CHANNEL BEFORE YOU COMMIT TO ITS NICHE

An Analytics tab on any channel estimates what it earns and shows what it
publishes. You get the views its recent uploads have taken and what those
are worth at the reference rate for its subject. You get how its long-form
views compare with its shorts. You get how often it posts and how long its
videos run, how old the channel is, and what an average video does on it.

JUDGE A VIDEO AT A GLANCE

Every thumbnail carries an outlier score, which compares a video's views with
its own channel's average. A video with 1.4M views on a channel that averages
1.5M is not a hit; it is a normal day. Views per hour sits beside it, and on a
watch page you also get engagement rate and an earnings estimate.

A monetization badge reads recent videos for advertising slots and reports
whether ads appear to be running. Hover it and you get the breakdown: not just
whether the channel earns, but how. It separates advertising from sponsorship
deals, from affiliate links, from products it sells and from viewer donations,
and shows you the line in the description that each one was read from.

MORE FEATURES

Copy the details of any video as clean text. You choose which parts you want
and how they are laid out. Copy as plain text, or as a bulleted or numbered
list. There is a Markdown option for pasting into documents and a CSV option
for spreadsheets, and JSON if you are feeding the output into something else.
If none of those suit you, write your own template and it will follow it.

View counts can come out the way YouTube shows them (271K) or as whole numbers
for sorting (271,000), and dates can stay relative or become calendar dates.

Take a transcript in one click, copied or saved as a file, with timestamps or
without. Download any thumbnail at the best resolution available. See
subscriber counts on thumbnails as you browse. Select several videos at once
and copy them together, with Alt+Shift+S to turn selection on and Alt+Shift+C
to copy what you have picked.

HONEST ABOUT ESTIMATES

The earnings figure is a view count multiplied by a reference rate for the
channel's subject, adjusted for video length and for the time of year, since
advertising is dearer in December than in January. Real rates are private to
each channel and no extension can read them. Audience country moves them
further than subject does, and that is not something a public page reveals, so
treat the number as a sense of scale rather than as revenue. Shorts show no
estimate at all, because they are paid from a different pool.

Monetization is inferred from whether recent videos carry advertising slots.
YouTube also runs ads on channels that are not monetized and keeps that
revenue, so the badge is an estimate rather than a status. Hover it to see how
many videos were checked. The one exception is a channel below 1,000
subscribers, which cannot run its own ads at all, and that is a fact rather
than a guess.

Similar channels are ranked by how a channel describes itself and titles its
videos, and by which channels YouTube recommends alongside it. When the
matches are weak the panel says so, rather than presenting a thin result as a
strong one.

WHAT LEAVES YOUR BROWSER

There are no accounts and no sign-in. Nothing is tracked and no analytics are
collected. Nothing is ever sold or shared. Your settings stay in your browser,
and free does not mean you are the product here, because there is no account
for anything to be attached to.

To produce its figures the extension reads the page you are on and requests
YouTube pages in the background. It reads channel pages and watch pages for
subscriber counts and advertising slots, and search results when it is looking
for related channels. Those requests go to YouTube and nowhere else, and carry
no account credentials.

Finding similar channels relies on a shared index of public channel
information. While that feature is switched on, the extension tells the index
which channel page you have opened and which channels YouTube recommended
beside a video you watched, so it can learn which channels resemble one
another. No account identifier and no viewing history is sent, and the index
holds relationships between channels rather than anything about people.

Switching "Similar Channels" off in the popup stops all of that.