Reference
How to read the site
Definitions, detector explanations, and the conventions the dashboard uses to describe one channel without smoothing the misses — plus what happens when you connect your own.
- What this is
One real YouTube channel, published openly and described without smoothing over the misses.
- What the language does
The glossary defines metrics and surfaces. The detectors explain what the engine noticed, and when.
- What this is not
Not a coaching layer, not a generic benchmark sheet, and not a promise that every pattern is causal.
Glossary
Plain-language definitions for every metric, traffic surface, and engine tier used across the dashboard.
Detectors
Every pattern the engine watches for — what each one looks for, when it activates, and whether it has fired on this channel.
- What connecting does
- Sign in with YouTube and your channel gets its own dashboard — every video, every quiet day, every metric, refreshed nightly. It starts private: only you, signed in, can open it.
- What access it asks for
- Two Google consent screens: the first proves who you are, the second grants read access to your channel’s data — exactly three scopes.
youtube.readonly— the channel itself: its videos, titles, and thumbnails.yt-analytics.readonly— the owner-only analytics: views, impressions, click rate, retention, traffic sources.yt-analytics-monetary.readonly— the revenue side of those reports, which YouTube gates behind its own grant.
- Public or private
- Every channel starts private: only you, signed in, can open its dashboard — to anyone else the page doesn’t exist. Going public is a separate choice, made from your account, and it publishes the channel by name — real titles, real numbers, visible to everyone. One part of that is permanent: once public, copies of what was visible can be made outside this site — search caches, web archives, saved downloads. Going private later stops publishing here; it doesn’t take back copies that already exist.
- When data shows up
- Dashboards build and refresh on the nightly update, around 06:00 UTC — a newly connected channel’s first dashboard lands with the next one. YouTube finalizes each day’s numbers two to three days later, so the most recent days fill in gradually. Changing visibility starts a build of its own: the change is typically live in 10–15 minutes — longer if a daily build is already running.
- The shared dataset
- A separate choice, off by default: adding your channel’s stats to a private, consent-gated dataset used to study how channels grow. It is never shown to anyone else — no other channel can read your data — and stopping deletes the contributed data on the next nightly update.
- Disconnecting
- Any time, from your account. Disconnecting revokes the site’s access to your channel’s YouTube data and deletes the channel’s stored data, including its private analytics; a public page stops updating and is removed. It can’t be undone — reconnecting starts fresh.
Core routes
Where the live data lives
If you want the live state, chronology, or raw evidence, these are the pages with the numbers.