YouTube Analytics API
Provides access to YouTube channel and video performance metrics including views, watch time, revenue, demographics, traffic sources, and engagement data for channel owners via Google OAuth.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
Google OAuth 2.0 infrastructure is best-in-class. Separate scopes for monetary vs non-monetary data enable meaningful privilege separation. Service account support with key rotation is well-documented. Google Cloud project model provides centralized audit logging.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
Building creator analytics tools, channel management automation, or performance reporting pipelines for YouTube channel owners who authenticate via Google OAuth or service accounts.
Avoid When
You need fresh same-day data, are analyzing channels you don't own, or need real-time streaming metrics rather than historical reporting.
Use Cases
- • Generate automated weekly performance reports for a YouTube channel covering views, watch time, and subscriber growth trends
- • Build a content strategy agent that identifies top-performing video topics, formats, and upload times from historical analytics
- • Monitor revenue and RPM trends across video categories to optimize monetization strategy for a multi-channel creator
- • Aggregate audience retention and click-through rate data to feed A/B testing recommendations for thumbnails and titles
- • Create a cross-channel dashboard aggregating analytics from multiple YouTube channels owned by the same organization
Not For
- • Accessing analytics for channels you do not own or manage — the API only returns data for channels authenticated via the owner's Google account
- • Real-time or near-real-time viewership monitoring — YouTube Analytics data has a reporting latency of 2-3 days for most metrics
- • Fetching video view counts for arbitrary public videos without channel ownership — use the YouTube Data API for public video statistics instead
Interface
Authentication
Google OAuth 2.0 required with YouTube-specific scopes (yt-analytics.readonly, yt-analytics-monetary.readonly for revenue data). Service accounts can be used for server-side automation when the channel owner delegates channel management. Requires Google Cloud project with YouTube Analytics API enabled. OAuth consent screen must be configured with appropriate scopes.
Pricing
Requires a Google Cloud project (which requires billing account setup) but does not incur charges for API usage within free quota. Credit card required for Google Cloud project creation even though analytics API itself is free.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Data reporting latency of 2-3 days means querying for yesterday's metrics will return empty or partial results — agents must use date ranges ending 3+ days in the past for reliable data
- ⚠ Not all dimension and metric combinations are valid — the API returns a 400 error for incompatible combinations; agents must consult the compatibility matrix or handle these errors explicitly
- ⚠ Revenue metrics (yt-analytics-monetary scope) require the channel to be in the YouTube Partner Program; agents should check monetization status before requesting revenue dimensions
- ⚠ OAuth token refresh is required for long-running agents — Google access tokens expire in 1 hour and service account tokens must be regenerated periodically
- ⚠ Quota is shared at the Google Cloud project level, not per API key — multiple agents using the same project credentials can collectively exhaust the daily quota
Alternatives
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-07.