YouTube Tools
The YouTube website provides different ways to access to the videos and video information in their database
- but after using it for a while, we found a few things that were missing. Fortunately, YouTube allows other websites
to access their video database too. In this section of the website, we present several tools that allow viewers and
channel owners to do some interesting new things.
This section of the website is "beta" code - and still under development.
We welcome problem reports or suggestions for improvement - please email us at
.
Try the Tools
YouTube viewers can now more easily browse the content of any channel that interests them.
Here are some tools to help:
These tools are useful, but are VERY slow on large channels:
What problems do the tools solve?
- Problem
- Solution
- Finding the best videos on a big channel takes too long
- Once you stumble across an interesting channel with 100+ videos, how do you decide which videos to watch first?
YouTube provides sorting by date uploaded (All videos), view count (Most viewed) or comment count (Most discussed).
However, none of those criteria really indicate whether previous viewers liked a video.
The Sort Channel Videos
tool adds the ability to sort videos by the number of favorites, the percent of viewers who favorited them (Faves%), the
average rating and more. Of these, we like the Faves% best because it lets us quickly find high-quality videos even if
they haven't been viewed by a lot of people yet.
- Browsing favorites is almost impossible
- Favorites are potentially one of the most useful parts of YouTube - but also the least supported. Since everyone
can create a list of Favorites even if they never upload a video, most people do. Over time, many Favorites lists grow
to 100, 200 or more videos. However, since Favorites lists can't be sorted in any way or accessed except sequentially in pages
of 20, few people ever look at their own old Favorites, much less someone else's.
The Sort Favorite Videos tool adds the same sorting
capabilities for Favorites that we offer for Videos. Now you can browse through an entire Favorites list and
find interesting videos quickly.
- Subscription info is hard to access
- There's a lot of information available in a channel's subscriptions, but it's only available one channel at a time.
The Sort Subscriptions tool shows every subscription, along with the number of videos,
number of favorites, number of friends, number of subscribers, number of subscriptions and more - all on one page.
It even shows which subscription accounts are closed or suspended.
- Playlists are under-used - and under-appreciated
- If your channel has more than 50 or so videos plus favorites, consider creating playlists of your content.
This will greatly help both you and your viewers find videos of interest. YouTube does a pretty good job with
playlists - except they're a bit hidden.
The Browse Channel Playlists tool provides a way to see all of a channel's playlists at a glance and
then browse to the ones of interest.
- If your account is suspended, you lose everything
- If you post copyrighted videos, you risk account suspension. Not only do you lose access to the videos on
the channel, you lose access to your list of Favorites, your list of Subscriptions, etc.
The Archive Channel Information tool and the
Archive Playlist Information tool can't give you access
to any of this once your account is suspended - but it can provide a complete list of each type of
information now that you can save on your PC - just in case.
YouTube Insight
YouTube provides one great analysis tool that many YouTube uploaders haven't yet tried.
Channel owners can access "YouTube Insight" from their "My Account" page to view
demographic information about their viewers, including age, gender and country distribution.
Here's some information about the BestArts audience.