YouTube Channel Analytics: Track Competitor Growth & Video Velocity

The "Copy-Paste" Growth Strategy

The fastest way to grow on YouTube isn't to reinvent the wheel—it's to find what's already working for your competitors and do it better. But manually checking their subscriber counts and view velocities is a waste of time.

In this guide, we'll build a YouTube Competitor Tracker that automatically monitors:

1. Channel Growth: Daily subscriber and view count changes.
2. Video Velocity: How fast new videos are gaining views in the first 24-48 hours.
3. Content Gaps: Topics your competitors are missing or underperforming on.

The Tech Stack

We'll use the SociaVault API to fetch channel and video data without needing complex OAuth setups or quota headaches.

Prerequisites

• Node.js installed
• A SociaVault API Key (get one here)
• axios for making API requests

Step 1: Fetching Channel Vitals

First, let's get the baseline metrics for a channel. We'll use the /channel endpoint to get subscriber counts, total views, and video counts.

const axios = require('axios');

const API_KEY = 'YOUR_SOCIAVAULT_API_KEY';
const BASE_URL = 'https://api.sociavault.com/v1/scrape/youtube';

async function getChannelStats(handle) {
  try {
    const response = await axios.get(`${BASE_URL}/channel`, {
      params: { handle },
      headers: { 'x-api-key': API_KEY }
    });

    const data = response.data.data;
    console.log(`\n📊 Stats for ${data.name} (${handle})`);
    console.log(`----------------------------------------`);
    console.log(`Subscribers: ${data.subscriberCountText}`);
    console.log(`Total Views: ${data.viewCountText}`);
    console.log(`Videos: ${data.videosCountText}`);
    console.log(`Description: ${data.description.substring(0, 100)}...`);
    
    return data;
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Error fetching channel stats:', error.response?.data || error.message);
  }
}

// Example usage
getChannelStats('MrBeast');

Step 2: Analyzing Video Velocity

Subscriber count is a vanity metric. View velocity (views per hour) is the real indicator of a viral video. Let's fetch the latest videos and calculate their performance.

async function analyzeVideoVelocity(channelId) {
  try {
    // Fetch latest videos
    const response = await axios.get(`${BASE_URL}/channel-videos`, {
      params: { 
        channelId, 
        sort: 'latest' 
      },
      headers: { 'x-api-key': API_KEY }
    });

    const videos = response.data.data.videos;
    
    console.log(`\n🚀 Video Velocity Analysis`);
    console.log(`----------------------------------------`);

    videos.slice(0, 5).forEach(video => {
      // Note: In a real app, you'd parse the "publishedTimeText" to get exact hours
      // For this demo, we'll just list the raw data
      console.log(`Title: ${video.title}`);
      console.log(`Views: ${video.viewCountText}`);
      console.log(`Published: ${video.publishedTimeText}`);
      console.log(`Link: https://youtube.com${video.url}`);
      console.log(`---`);
    });

  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Error analyzing videos:', error.response?.data || error.message);
  }
}

Step 3: The "Outlier" Detector

The holy grail of YouTube analytics is finding outliers—videos that perform significantly better than the channel's average. These are the topics you should be covering.

Here's a script that compares a video's views to the channel's average (estimated) to flag high-performers.

async function findOutliers(handle) {
  // 1. Get Channel ID first
  const channelData = await getChannelStats(handle);
  if (!channelData) return;

  // 2. Get Videos
  const response = await axios.get(`${BASE_URL}/channel-videos`, {
    params: { 
      channelId: channelData.id, 
      sort: 'popular' // Look at their best performing content
    },
    headers: { 'x-api-key': API_KEY }
  });

  const videos = response.data.data.videos;
  
  console.log(`\n💎 Top Performing Outliers for ${handle}`);
  console.log(`----------------------------------------`);

  // Simple heuristic: Top 5 videos are their "Hall of Fame"
  videos.slice(0, 5).forEach((video, index) => {
    console.log(`#${index + 1}: ${video.title}`);
    console.log(`   Views: ${video.viewCountText}`);
    console.log(`   Duration: ${video.lengthText}`);
  });
}

// Run the full analysis
findOutliers('Veritasium');

Why This Matters for 2025

YouTube's algorithm in 2025 is heavily focused on Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Average View Duration (AVD). By analyzing your competitors' outliers, you are essentially seeing which topics and thumbnails have already proven to drive high CTR and AVD.

Strategy for Growth:

1. Identify 5-10 competitors in your niche.
2. Run this script weekly to spot new breakout videos.
3. Analyze the "Hook" (first 30 seconds) of their top videos.
4. Create a "Remix"—same topic, but with your unique angle or better production value.

Next Steps

Ready to build your own YouTube dashboard? Get your API key and start tracking.

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