CODEWITHSUNDEEP
youtube-apiyoutube-data-api
radekmika
radekmika

Reputation: 76

Missing subscriber count for some channels

We have noticed that a lot of YouTube channels doesn't have information about the number of subscribers on the web and in the API it's then 0.

Normally it looks like this for most channels, like https://www.youtube.com/user/tmobile/about (http://cl.ly/image/0Y3u0w3H152a)

We have also noticed that for a lot of channels it went from values in thousands of subscribers to zero on one day - 21st September 2014. For example these 2 channels: https://www.youtube.com/user/Acer/about (http://cl.ly/image/162Q1z0C0T40) https://www.youtube.com/user/tmobilecz/about (http://cl.ly/image/0l2H1w1e1z0x)

Is this some kind of update from YouTube? Or this is up to administrator of a channel to choose, if this information will or won't be available (both on the web and in the API)?

Using API v2 or v3 doesn't make any difference.

Appreciate your help. Thanks!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3057

Answers (1)

paolo
paolo

Reputation: 2538

On https://www.youtube.com/advanced_settings, there's an option called Subscriber Counts, which you can set to either public or private. Since you can hide your subscriber count on youtube itself, it's logical that it is also hidden in the API.

You can check whether subscriber count is hidden by checking the boolean property hiddenSubscriberCount of the statistics-part of your retrieved channel item.

API Reference

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions