In March 2024, after a few months of using Youtube, I realized that I was missing something to fully understand how my channel was evolving.

I needed numbers.

I love numbers.

So I coded a quick trick I called TubeTally and talked about it in a video.

And then a Youtuber contacted me:

Hi Hugo,
I tried to contact you through Youtube but the email address you provided doesn't work.
I saw that you were talking about TubeTally, and I'd like to know more about it.
I'm a Youtuber and I'm interested in this kind of tool.
Could you tell me more about it?
See you soon

In short, it was decided that TubeTally would be released.

In March, I spoke about it with Karim Matrah.

In April with BenjaminCode.

Yes, you don't know those youtubers, because you don't speak French! But they're great, I promise.

And always did I say:

TubeTally will undoubtedly be released very soon, I promise.

In May, it still wasn't out, but I kept mentioning it in a blog post.

And then, a few months later, the world's biggest Youtuber released... Viewstats.
It's all about numbers, and Youtube.

But do you think that's why TubeTally never came out?

It's more complex than that. So let me tell you how this application was born, how it went through several turbulences, and what it eventually became.

The idea

Let's get back to basics: what is TubeTally?

When you make videos on Youtube, you have access to Youtube studio, which provides you with a bunch of information:

• the click-through rate on the number of times your thumbnail has been suggested
• the number of times Youtube has suggested your content
• percentage of video views
• engagement rate

etc. etc. ...

It's great, but the Youtube studio is still limited.

As a Youtuber, we want to compare the results of these videos with each other or with videos by other Youtubers. We want to understand whether the likes/views ratio is normal or not.

We want to get suggestions for improving titles. We want to identify the best concepts, on our channel or on those of others.

In short, there's a market for lots of other applications.

But I quickly realized that I'm not the only one who thinks so, there's a whole ecosystem already out there: VidIq, TubeBuddy, SocialBlade, MorningFame, 1out of 10

With so many people already there, it was time to give up, wasn't it?

No, it wasn't.

Competition is normal. An idea is never original.

In fact, it's the opposite: it validates that there are people who can make a living from it, and that there are customers willing to pay for it.

And the Youtube "niche" is huge.
Youtube is the dominant platform for online videos. Video production has been democratized to such an extent that the number of new channels is exploding all the time - it's a new Eldorado.

So I thought it was a good time to sell shovels...

ViewStats

But, back to my competitor stories.

Having competitors is normal.

Except perhaps when that competitor is known by every Youtuber in the world.

June 2024 saw the release of "ViewStats", by MrBeast.

MrBeast has 344M subscribers and is the world's largest Youtube channel.

He started at 13, is now 26 and lives for it.

He sleeps in his studios, shoots several times a day on sets he had built in a small town in the USA.

Above all, he takes a very scientific approach to video, to the extent that he has developed numerous tools to help him understand and grow his channel.

So when it comes to credibility on viewstats, he's way ahead of the game.

And yet, I didn't see this as a problem. In fact, it confirmed even more that what I wanted to do was possible. Viewstats was capable of showing historical data from every channel in the world.

And that's exactly what I needed.

But still, I should have known better.

Problems

At this point, I need to talk about Youtube's API. An API is what allows you to communicate with an application, in this case Youtube.

To make TubeTally, I have lots of questions to ask Youtube:

• Give me this person's videos,
• Give me click rates,
• playback times etc...

In April, I spoke with Karim Matrah who alerted me to this famous API. In essence, he tells me:

Be careful, Youtube has set call quotas. So it's very limited, and no doubt Youtube wants to avoid seeing competitors to Youtube Studio appear.

In fact, the number of questions I can ask the API per day is limited.

But I've found a trick that consists in creating several accounts, each of which allows me to have a certain number of questions per day.

So far, so good.

But I soon realized a second limitation: certain statistics were not provided by the API.

They are visible in Youtube Studio, but not in the API.

And we're talking here about two very important statistics:

• click-through rate
• number of impressions

Without these two statistics, there are plenty of questions that can't be answered. They're among the top 3 statistics to analyze on a channel.

It's starting to look like a lot of problems, but I haven't given up yet. As I was saying, there are plenty of possible niches on Youtube and I always saw competitive analysis as a promising subject.

Competitive analysis means being able to study the statistics of other channels and compare their progress with our own.

The idea is to understand the typical progression for a given niche.

The idea is also to have points of comparison, on like rates, comment rates, to understand what differentiates the two channels and by extension, understand what we need to do differently.

SocialBlade, another application, provides some of this information, and when Viewstats came out, it also showed what I wanted to achieve. So I was sure it could be done.

Except, I'd misunderstood.

SocialBlade, like Viewstats, doesn't use the Youtube API.

A channel's history is not available. Individual stats for each youtuber's video are not available.

So how do these two applications work? Well, they consult videos and channels every day.

It's called crawling, and it automatically explores the web and extracts useful information.

But that's a very expensive thing to do, and it was beginning to far outstrip the budget at my disposal.

Above all, I was beginning to understand something.

Building a product that relies so much on the goodwill of Youtube, which can decide overnight to modify its API to accept one use but forbid another, is a real pain in the ass.

And what if tomorrow Youtube decided to strengthen studio to have a premium version?

What if tomorrow, Youtube decided to create an equivalent of 1outof10, or meetsponsors.

Ah, well, this is the part of the story where I have to tell you about BenjaminCode, the author of meetsponsors. Meetsponsors makes it easy for youtubers to find sponsors.

And recently, Benjamin was surprised to see Youtube start to take an interest in connecting brands and youtubers by releasing Brand Connect.

Game over? No. Fortunately for him, there are some pretty big differences and BrandConnect doesn't exactly match what meetsponsors does. But this story illustrates the risk I was talking about.

Data is said to be the new oil of the 21st century.
When a company, in this case Youtube, possesses this data, it is in a position of strength.
Anyone wishing to exploit it must face the risk that Youtube may decide to change the rules.

It's worth the risk, because given its size, Youtube won't be able to exploit all the existing niches. But for me, it was starting to look bad.

And the final blow came in August when I went to Japan.
I forgot to save the application code, which remained in Lyon. What an idi...

However, to be honest, the end of TubeTally had already been decided even if I hadn't realized it yet. It's a blessing in disguise. It saved me from having to maintain a project that was already stillborn.

Well, not quite. The story doesn't end there.

Renaissance

In the meantime, I've been thinking about another application.

If TubeTally was dead, these ideas could be transposed to another field I know well: blogging.

Because all the tools I'd analyzed for YouTube, well, they're just not available for bloggers.

What if I were to build a solution, a toolbox that would allow you to monitor your blog's performance in the same way as in the YouTube studio, that would provide you with technical advice, suggestions for content improvement, engagement analysis or that would help you understand why one article works better than another.

And so TubeTally became BlogTally.

And that's how Youtube and MrBeast finally convinced me to abandon my idea and build a new one.

The rest, we'll see. And I'll keep you posted.