Free tool
YouTube channel analyzer
Enter a channel and get its niche, what it sells, and who has sponsored it, how often and when. Public data, no sign-in, nothing stored.
How it works
- We look up the channel and its newest 300 uploads through the official YouTube Data API: titles, descriptions, publish dates, YouTube’s paid-promotion flag and the channel’s topic tags.
- A video counts as sponsored when YouTube flags it as paid promotion or the text discloses a sponsor. Links on those videos that are not the creator’s own are followed through tracking redirects to the brand’s real domain.
- Brands are grouped by name and domain, with the number of videos, first and last date, the evidence, and an example video to confirm.
- The niche is read two ways: YouTube’s topic tags, and a keyword match of the scanned videos against twenty niches with the share that matched.
Costs the tool about 13 YouTube API units per channel; results are cached for 24 hours. Read about quota in our quota calculator.
Who this is for
Agencies and brands
Qualify a channel in a minute: niche, how commercial it already is, which competitors have sponsored it, and when. Download the CSV for the shortlist.
Creators
Look up channels one step bigger than yours in your niche. Their sponsors are your pitch list, and the example videos show what the integration looked like.
Questions
- How does it know a video was sponsored?
- Three signals, each shown in the evidence column: YouTube's own "includes paid promotion" flag on the video; a disclosure in the title or description ("sponsored by", "thanks to X for sponsoring", "in partnership with", "#ad", "use code"); and links that appear only on those disclosed videos and are not the creator's own, followed through tracking redirects to the brand's real domain.
- Will it find every sponsor?
- No. A sponsor that was only mentioned in the video, never in text, and never flagged as paid promotion is invisible to any tool that reads public data. It can also list a brand the creator merely thanked. Treat the list as a strong starting point and open the example video to confirm.
- How is the niche decided?
- Two ways, shown separately. YouTube's own topic tags for the channel, which are broad (Technology, Lifestyle, Music). And our keyword read of the scanned titles and descriptions against twenty niches, with the share of videos that matched, which is specific but can be fooled by a channel that covers several things.
- What does 'sells' mean?
- Whether the channel's descriptions point to its own course, membership, coaching, merchandise or newsletter. Agencies use it to see how commercial a channel already is; creators use it to see what channels like theirs monetise.
- Does it store the channels I look up?
- No. Results are cached for 24 hours so a repeat lookup costs nothing, then discarded. We do not build a database of channels or sponsors from this tool.
- What else will the analyzer show?
- This first version covers niche, topics, what the channel sells, and sponsors. Upload cadence, how engaged the audience is, and how well the channel answers its comments are next; the unanswered comments checker already covers the last one for any channel.
- Why is there a daily limit?
- The free tools share 100 lookups a day on YouTube's API quota. Each scan here costs about 13 units of the 10,000 a day that project has, so the limit is ours, not YouTube's, and it keeps the tools available for everyone.
- I am a creator. What do I do with this?
- Run it on channels in your niche that are a bit bigger than you. The brands that sponsor them are the brands most likely to sponsor you, and the example videos show what a sponsored integration looks like at that size. Then run the unanswered comments checker on your own channel; sponsors read comment sections too.