YouTube Channel Analytics API: Subscribers, Views & Top Videos

YouTube's official Data API v3 is technically free and practically a maze. Every call spends from a daily quota, search.list alone burns 100 units against a 10,000-unit budget, and reading another creator's channel drags you through OAuth scopes you do not actually need. If all you want is a channel's subscriber count, lifetime views, and best-performing videos, that machinery is overkill.

This API collapses that to one authenticated GET. Pass a channel — as an @handle, a UC... channel id, or a full YouTube URL — and get back a clean { data, meta } envelope. Three endpoints cover the channel profile, its top videos, and aggregate view analytics. No quota units, no OAuth dance, no per-project approval. A request either returns 200 with data or costs you nothing.

The three endpoints

Pull the channel profile

Start with the profile. It returns the durable channel-level numbers: followers (YouTube subscribers), view_count (lifetime channel views across every upload), and posts_count (total videos the channel has published), plus full_name, channel_id, is_verified, and country.

curl "https://api.virev.ai/v1/youtube/profile?q=@MrBeast" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VIREV_API_KEY"

import requests

res = requests.get(
    "https://api.virev.ai/v1/youtube/profile",
    params={"q": "@MrBeast"},
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer kb_live_..."},
)
profile = res.json()["data"]
print(profile["followers"], profile["view_count"])

Views-only: the one quirk to design around

Top videos, ranked by views

The videos endpoint returns the channel highest-viewed uploads — up to 100 in a single call for a flat $0.0005, controlled by limit. Each item has id, title, views, length_seconds, is_live_content, category, and thumbnail. Because there are no timestamps, treat this as an all-time leaderboard of what performed best, not a recent-uploads feed.

const res = await fetch(
  "https://api.virev.ai/v1/youtube/videos?q=UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA&limit=10",
  { headers: { Authorization: "Bearer kb_live_..." } },
);

const { data, meta } = await res.json();
// ranked by view count, highest first — no publish dates exist
console.log(meta.cost, meta.balance);

View analytics for the whole channel

For a rollup, GET /v1/youtube/stats computes across the tracked corpus: tracked_videos, plus total, average, max, and median views, avg_length_seconds, and the top 5 videos by views. It is the fastest way to size a channel typical performance without paging the full video list yourself. One call, $0.0010.

Mind the two counts: tracked_videos is how many uploads we hold for the channel, while posts_count on the profile is the channel own all-time upload total — usually the larger number.

import requests

stats = requests.get(
    "https://api.virev.ai/v1/youtube/stats",
    params={"q": "@MrBeast"},
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer kb_live_..."},
).json()["data"]

print(stats["tracked_videos"], stats["avg_length_seconds"])

Getting the identifier right

One footgun worth calling out: YouTube handles are case-sensitive. @MrBeast and @mrbeast are not the same string to the resolver, and the wrong casing returns a 404 — which, to be clear, costs you nothing. When you can, store and query the stable UC... channel id instead; it never changes even if a creator rebrands their handle.

• @handle — case-sensitive; @MrBeast and @mrbeast are different channels to the resolver.
• UC... channel id — the stable identifier; survives handle and display-name changes.
• Full URL — paste any youtube.com/@handle or youtube.com/channel/UC... URL directly as q.