I've been running an automated YouTube channel alongside three programmatic directory sites since April. The video side uses a two-host VTuber pipeline that generates daily scripts and renders them overnight. What I didn't have until last week was any feedback mechanism — the script generator just produced content in a vacuum, with no idea which videos were actually landing.
The fix is scripts/yt-analytics/run.py, a 330-line Python script that runs daily, reads the last 30 videos via the YouTube Data API v3, classifies them as high or low performers, and writes bias hints back to docs/yt-knowhow-bank-en.md — the same file the script generator reads before each session.
This is a closed loop, not magic. But closing the loop is the entire point.
Fetching the Channel Without a Stable Channel ID
The first problem was channel resolution. YouTube's v3 API takes a channel ID in most endpoints, but I didn't want to hardcode an ID that might break if the channel was ever recreated. The script tries four strategies in order:
