YouTube Analytics API Questions

Question

I'm new to the YouTube Analytics API, and had a couple of questions:

• In order to retrieve Analytics reports, I have to specify the channel ID for the "ids" parameter. How do I find the channel ID for the OAuth-authenticated user? I saw in the Sample Application that I can call Channels.list method in the Data API (V3) and use the "mine=true" parameter. Is this guaranteed to return a single channel? If not, how do I know which channel is the right one? What's the recommended way of finding a user's channel ID?

• Once I have the channel ID, I can begin querying for Analytics data. I'd like to query the "views" metric for the channel for the entire history of that channel. The question is, how do I know how far back to query? Is there a channel start date? The Channels.list method mentioned above doesn't return the snippet.publishedAt date for my channel so that doesn't seem to be a reliable way. How else do I know when to stop? I guess I could query back until 2005 or so when YouTube was founded but that seems like a bad approach. Any suggestions?

• The Analytics API supports reports for channels as well as content owners. Once a user authenticates via OAuth, how do I know if that account is a regular YouTube account vs a CMS content owner account?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

• The recommended approach is to do a channels.list(mine=true). The first result returned will be the channel corresponding to the currently authorized user. (channels.list() returns a list of channels because there are other combinations of request parameters that could result in more than one channel being returned.)

• Going back to some arbitrary date in the past should be harmless. 2005, 2000, etc. The YouTube Analytics backend should know how to properly deal with that, and you'll obviously only get stats that date back to the first views associated with your channel.

• The value of the ids= parameter tells the API whether you want to do a report against a channel associated with the current authorized user (ids=channel==UC...) or against channels/videos that you have access to as a CMS content owner (ids=contentOwner==CONTENT_OWNER_NAME).