Okay, so I got this idea to track Bryson DeChambeau’s YouTube subscriber count. I’m a big golf fan, and Bryson’s channel is pretty interesting. I wanted to see how his subscriber numbers change over time, especially after big tournaments or when he posts new videos. I thought it’d be a fun little project to work on.
First, I needed to figure out where to get the data. YouTube doesn’t make it super easy to just grab subscriber counts whenever you want. I did some digging and found a few websites that track this kind of stuff, but I wanted something more… direct, you know? More under my control.
Finding the Data
I remembered that YouTube has an API – basically, a way for developers to interact with YouTube’s data. I figured there had to be a way to get the subscriber count from there. I’d never really messed with APIs before, so this was a learning experience.
I signed up for a Google Cloud account, got myself an API key (which is like a password to access the data), and started reading the YouTube Data API documentation. Honestly, it was a bit overwhelming at first. Lots of technical jargon, but I eventually figured out the specific request I needed to make to get the channel statistics, including the subscriber count.
Setting up the Tracker
Next, I needed a way to automatically check the subscriber count and store the data. I decided to use Python because I’ve dabbled with it before, and it seemed like a good fit for this kind of task. Plus, there are tons of helpful libraries out there.
I found a Python library that could interact with the YouTube Data API, installed it, and wrote a simple script. This script would:
- Use my API key to connect to YouTube.
- Ask for the statistics for Bryson’s channel.
- Grab the subscriber count from the response.
- Store the subscriber count along with the current date and time.
I chose to store the data in a simple text file. Each line in the file would have the date, time, and subscriber count, separated by commas. That way, I could easily load it into a spreadsheet or use it for other analysis later.
Making It Run Regularly
Now, I needed to make this script run automatically. I didn’t want to have to manually run it every day. So, I used a task scheduler. There’s a built-in one on my computer, and I set it up to run my Python script once a day. Easy peasy.
It is running!
I’ve been running my tracker for a few weeks now, and it’s been pretty cool to see the subscriber count change. It’s not always a huge jump, but you can definitely see the trends.
