In my latest video, I analyzed the impacts of the popular YouTube series Content Cop, and the journey of actually acquiring the data I needed for this was much longer than anticipated. In this post, I’ll explain how to scrape subscription and views data for a YouTube channel so you don’t have to go through the same frustrations that I did.

If you’ve ever used the YouTube API, you’ll know that you can only get current subscription numbers from it — you cannot go back in time or fetch historical subscription data with the API. Now, you could build your own database and update it daily with API calls. Or, you can take advantage of the fact that SocialBlade has already done this, and scrape your data from the third party website.

However, there are two pitfalls that you might fall into when using SocialBlade. The first is that it only makes data from the last 3 years publicly available, in order to be compliant with GDPR. The second is that in late 2019, it changed which data is available in accordance with YouTube changing what is available through their API .

#data-visualization #youtube #social-blade #data-scraping #data-analysis #data-science