A personal research tool for studying which YouTube content formats are gaining audience over time.
What it does
ViralPanel is a small set of command-line scripts, run locally by its single author, that studies
content formats — repeatable title and content patterns such as “how X was built”
or “what X turns into” — rather than individual videos or creators. It maintains a fixed research
panel of roughly 400 public YouTube channels and asks one question: which formats are lifting a
channel’s baseline (its median views), as opposed to producing a single lucky outlier.
How it works
Public metadata and statistics for the panel are retrieved from the YouTube Data API v3
(API key only — no OAuth, no user sign-in, no access to any private data).
The tool computes derived analytics locally: per-channel median views and a
“baseline lift” ratio (post-peak median ÷ pre-peak median), used to separate a durable
format from a one-off spike.
Results are stored in a local SQLite database on the author’s own computer and are used
only to inform the author’s own original content decisions.
What it is not
Not a public service: there is no hosted application, no user accounts, and no sign-up.
Not a data product: no YouTube API data is republished, resold, or shared with third parties.
Not an advertising or influencer-matching tool, and it does not upload, modify, or manage
any YouTube content.