Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this thing called “Watcher Entertainment” – you know, those guys who do a bunch of cool stuff on YouTube. I really dig their shows, especially “Ghost Files.” Anyway, I got this itch to see how many subscribers they have. Not just a one-time peek, but like, keep track of it over time. See how it goes up and down, you know?
First off, I needed a way to grab that subscriber count. After a bit of digging, I found out that there is a public API for YouTube data. Sounded promising! I signed up for a developer account and got myself an API key. It was a bit of a hassle with all the forms and stuff, but hey, gotta do what you gotta do.
Next, I needed to figure out how to use this API. I’m no coding whiz, but I can get by with Python. I found some examples online and hacked together a script that would hit the API, ask for the Watcher Entertainment channel’s stats, and then pull out the subscriber count. It took some trial and error, I’ll admit. Lots of error messages and head-scratching, but eventually, I got it working!
But just getting the number once wasn’t enough. I wanted to keep track of it, so I set up a simple text file to store the data. Every time I ran my script, it would grab the latest subscriber count and add it to the file, along with the date and time. Pretty basic, but it did the job.
Now, to make this whole thing automatic, I used a thing called “cron” on my computer. It’s like a scheduler that can run commands at specific times. I told cron to run my Python script every day at noon. This way, I didn’t even have to think about it – my script would just wake up, grab the data, and save it to the file. Neat, right?
I let this run for a few weeks, and soon enough, I had a nice little collection of data. I could see how the subscriber count was changing over time. To make it even easier to see, I used another little Python script to turn that data into a simple chart. Nothing fancy, just a line graph showing the ups and downs.
Here’s a summary of what I did:
- Found the YouTube API that could give me channel statistics.
- Signed up for a developer account and got an API key.
- Wrote a Python script to use the API and get the subscriber count.
- Created a text file to store the data.
- Used cron to schedule my script to run automatically.
- Made a simple chart to visualize the data.
So yeah, that’s my little adventure in tracking Watcher Entertainment’s subscriber count. It was a fun project, and I learned a thing or two about APIs, Python, and cron. Plus, now I have this cool chart showing how their channel is growing. Pretty sweet, if you ask me!
What did I learn?
- It is possible to get the YouTube channel statistics, but you need an API key.
- Writing Python scripts is not that hard with some example code.
- Data storage can be as simple as a text file.
- Automation is my friend, thanks to cron.
- Making a chart can help visualize data.
