Connect a YouTube channel.

What does connecting a channel do?

Signing in with YouTube gives a channel its own dashboard — every video, every quiet day, every metric, refreshed nightly. It starts private: only the signed-in owner can open it, and to everyone else the page does not exist.

What access does it ask for?

Two read-only Google scopes and nothing more: youtube.readonly (the channel itself — its videos, titles, and thumbnails) and yt-analytics.readonly (the owner-only analytics — views, impressions, click rate, retention, traffic sources). Both are read-only, so the site can read a channel's stats but cannot upload, edit, or remove anything on the channel. No monetization or revenue access is requested. The key Google issues is stored encrypted and is never part of anything published.

Is a connected channel public or private?

Every channel starts private — only its signed-in owner can open the dashboard. Going public is a separate, owner-only choice that publishes the channel by name, with real titles and real numbers visible to everyone. One part of that is permanent: once a channel is public, copies of what was visible can be made outside the site — search caches, web archives, saved downloads — and going private later stops publishing here but cannot recall copies that already exist.

When does the data show up?

Dashboards build and refresh on the nightly update, around 06:00 UTC, so a newly connected channel's first dashboard lands with the next one — typically ten to fifteen minutes for a visibility change, longer if a daily build is already running. There is no fake progress bar. YouTube finalizes each day's numbers two to three days later, so the most recent days fill in gradually.

What is the shared dataset?

A separate choice, off by default: a channel can add its 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 it, and turning it off deletes the contributed data on the next nightly update.

What happens on disconnect?

Disconnecting is available any time from the owner's account. It revokes the site's access to the channel's YouTube data and deletes the channel's stored data, including its private analytics; a public page stops updating and is removed. It cannot be undone — reconnecting starts fresh.

See what a dashboard looks like first.