YouTube Toolkit

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. PREVIEW YOUR VIDEO BEFORE YOU PUBLISH In YouTube Studio, a Preview button beside Undo changes, and in the upload dialog, shows your video the way viewers will meet it: on the home page beside the videos YouTube recommends to you, or in the suggestions beside a video like yours. It uses the title and thumbnail in the form, even before you save them. Switch between phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, 1440p and TV, light or dark, or drag the edges to any size, and try other titles and thumbnails without changing anything in Studio. 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. Anonymous usage statistics (which features are switched on and how often each is opened, under a random install ID) are sent to our own service and can be switched off in Settings > Privacy. They never include what you watch, search or copy. Nothing is ever sold or shared. Your settings stay in your browser. 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, search…