Reference

How to read the site

What every metric and traffic source on this site means, in YouTube’s own words — plus what happens when you connect your own channel.

RegisterObservationalEvery entry describes what a number means, never what to do about it.
  1. What this is

    Each dashboard is one real YouTube channel's full public record, published openly and described without smoothing over the misses.

  2. What the language does

    The glossary below defines the metrics and traffic sources in YouTube's own words. Methods explains what the engine noticed, and when.

  3. What this is not

    Not a coaching layer, not a generic benchmark sheet, and not a promise that every pattern is causal.

The words

What each number means

YouTube’s own vocabulary, defined once. Each entry says what is measured, never what to do about it.

  1. Metrics

    CTR
    Click-through rate — the share of impressions that became a click. On YouTube it depends on thumbnail, title, and which audience YouTube is showing the video to — rarely a single cause.
    Click rate
    The plain-English gloss for CTR — the share of impressions that became a click. Open Channel Stats labels charts and tables as “CTR”, YouTube’s own name for it.
    Impressions
    The count of times a thumbnail was shown to a viewer in YouTube’s UI — in the Browse feed, the Suggested column, search results, and similar surfaces. Impression counts come from YouTube’s reports, which reach back about thirty days from when a channel connects — the window is per day, so earlier days show views without impressions. Each channel’s own first covered day is named on its data page.
    Watch time
    The total minutes viewers spent watching a video, summed across all viewers and sessions.
    AVD (average view duration)
    The mean number of minutes viewers watched per view. Surfaced as “Avg view duration” (“Avg duration” in tight columns) in the dashboard.
    Retention
    The share of a video’s runtime viewers watched on average — avg view duration ÷ video length. Often correlates with topic-audience fit and pacing.

  2. Traffic surfaces

    Where YouTube placed the thumbnail before the click.

    Browse / Homepage
    A traffic source meaning the video was shown on a viewer’s YouTube homepage or subscription feed — often the first surface where a channel reaches non-subscribers beyond search.
    Suggested videos
    A traffic source meaning the video was shown next to or after another video the viewer was already watching. Typically the largest source for established channels.
    External
    A traffic source meaning the view arrived from outside YouTube — a link on another site, a social post, a newsletter, a message.
    Shorts feed
    A traffic source meaning the video was served in the vertical Shorts feed rather than on the homepage, beside another video, or in search.

  3. Video state

    Era
    A continuous span where a video’s title and thumbnail stay stable. When either changes, a new era begins. Used for before/after comparisons on the /changes page.
    Reporting cutoff
    The latest date with complete reporting data. YouTube’s reporting has a 2–3 day lag, so charts and detectors filter to dates on or before the cutoff — this keeps empty days from looking like zero days.
    Pre-publish stub
    A row in video_daily or traffic_daily whose date is earlier than the video’s publish date. YouTube’s Reporting API sometimes emits these zero-impression placeholders for the seven days before publish; Open Channel Stats flags them with pre_publish_stub = 1 and excludes them from every aggregate.

  4. The shared pool

    Where a reading labeled “derived from the shared pool” comes from.

    Channels like this one

    The channels sharing their numbers into a shared pool — sharing is on from connect, stated on the connect page itself, and each owner keeps a real off switch — that happen to broadly resemble this one: similar subscriber size, category, channel age, and video format. Once two or more of them line up, the dashboard can describe what a typical stretch looked like across them, always labeled derived from the shared pool and set beside this channel’s own numbers — a reading drawn from the channels on this site that share, never an outside benchmark. It reflects only the channels that are actually sharing, not every similar channel out there. When no comparable channels are sharing, nothing is shown — the line simply doesn’t appear rather than inventing a benchmark. The count shown in the details is a minimum, never an exact tally.

  1. Methods

    How a number gets from YouTube to this site, every stated condition on it, every pattern the engine watches for, the strongest arguments against what it says, and what the projections have been worth.

  2. Research

    Common creator beliefs checked daily against a real channel's record — what each check does, what the data said, and how long that answer has held.

Your channel

Connect your channel

What connecting does, what it can read, who can see it, and when things show up.

Sign in with YouTube →
What connecting does
Sign in with YouTube and your channel gets its own dashboard — every video, every quiet day, every metric, refreshed daily. 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 two 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.
Both are read-only: the site can read your stats and can’t upload, edit, or remove anything on your channel. The key Google issues is stored encrypted and is never part of anything published.
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
A first build starts when a channel connects — the dashboard is typically ready in 10–15 minutes, longer if a daily build is already running — and it refreshes with the daily build, around 06:00 UTC, after that. YouTube’s first reports arrive within a day or two of connecting, and each day’s numbers finalize 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 pool
Sharing is on when your channel connects — the connect page says so before the Google sign-in step. Your channel’s stats go into the consent-gated shared pool that powers the reference readings — the typical-for-channels-like-this bands shown across dashboards. Aggregates never name a channel; public pooled channels are listed by name on the directory. Turning sharing off — any time, from your account — deletes the contributed data on the next daily build. Every connected channel gets the pool reference readings — the typical-for-channels-like-this bands — whether or not it shares. Sharing decides what goes into the pool, never what a channel reads from it.
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. Its public page stops serving within seconds; the page and its listing in the site directory are removed on the next daily build. It can’t be undone — reconnecting starts fresh.