YouTube discovery

Finder searches YouTube for channels that already talk about your category. You get the channel, the videos that matched, and the reason each one is there.

YouTube and website discovery run at the same time. YouTube gets up to 270 seconds for provider work inside the scan's five-minute boundary. Any channel and evidence finished before that cutoff is kept. Requests still running at the cutoff are aborted, and they cannot add a late row or spend more of the scan budget.

What a scan searches for

Each scan runs two kinds of search, in your brand's country and language:

• One search for each of your keywords.
• One search for each competitor, as "Name review".

A channel that turns up in five searches is still one row. The row lists every search that found it.

What you see on each row

Every YouTube row carries the videos that earned it. Each video shows:

• Its title and link.
• Its view count and the date it went up.
• Which of your competitors it names, in the title or the description.
• What the channel already promotes, when the video says so.
• Its duration, when YouTube supplied one.

You never see a score without at least one video behind it.

The two numbers

Average views is the mean view count of the channel's last ten uploads. It tells you what a new video is likely to get, which the subscriber count doesn't.

Some channels hide their subscriber count. Those rows say "unknown". We don't estimate it.

Sometimes we can't read a channel's last ten uploads. Then the average covers only the videos that matched, and the row says so. A missing duration, subscriber count or upload cadence stays unknown. Finder does not turn missing data into zero.

How active the channel is

We count how many of the last ten uploads landed per month, measured up to today. A channel that stopped posting a year ago reads as quiet, even if it used to post daily.

Finder stores that normalized cadence beside the evidence. A later re-score uses the same fact even after the raw provider response has expired. Older rows without cadence use the most recent evidence date instead.

What they already promote

An affiliate link is a link with a code in it that tells the seller who sent the buyer. Finder reads each video's title and description for signs the channel already uses them:

• A rate in their own words, like "earn 30% lifetime".
• A link with a referral code, like ?ref= or ?via=. The row names the site it points to.
• A link through an affiliate network.
• A line saying they earn from links.

We only repeat what the video says. We never guess a rate. A discount like "30% off" is shown as a discount code, not as a commission.

Channels we leave out

Four kinds of channel match your keywords and still aren't worth an email. Finder removes them and keeps a count with the reason.

1. Off topic. YouTube's search is loose. A search for one product can return videos about something else with a similar name. We keep a video when it names a competitor, or its title has two words from one of your keywords.
2. A competitor's own channel. You won't recruit them.
3. Content farms. A content farm is a channel that posts thousands of videos nobody watches. We remove a channel above 3,000 videos when its matched videos average under 500 views. Between 2,000 and 3,000 videos, it is removed only when the average is under 250. One exception: a channel that already links to your competitor as an affiliate stays in. That's your best kind of prospect.
4. The wrong audience. This one only runs if you sell affiliate software. Channels that teach people to earn from affiliate links match your keywords, but their viewers want to join programs, not run one. We compare their matched titles. When more of them teach earning than running a program, the channel goes.

Shorts and long videos

We keep every video's length. Finder marks anything of 60 seconds or less as a likely Short, so you can filter them.

Country

Many channels don't state a country. When they don't, the row says the country is unknown. We don't guess from the language or the name.

Find channels like one you know

Paste a channel link, a handle like @name, or a video link. Finder reads that channel's last twenty video titles and searches on two things:

• Phrases the titles share.
• The products its recent reviews cover. Another channel that reviewed the same product is the closest match YouTube has.

The channel you pasted never appears in its own results. Channels it features on its page are added when it has any. This search spends one search credit. If it fails, the credit comes back.

When you add a known channel or import an exclusion, Finder resolves a handle through YouTube's official channel lookup and stores the channel ID. Two forms of the same handle therefore point to one saved channel. If the lookup cannot resolve a handle, Finder leaves it unresolved and never claims it will exclude a channel.

When a scan fails

YouTube gives every app a daily allowance of requests. If that allowance runs out, the scan fails and tells you why. It doesn't show you half a list as if it were the whole one. The allowance resets at midnight Pacific time, and the next scan runs as normal.

Each scan also has its own request budget. If it runs short, Finder skips the last-ten-uploads step first and keeps the channels it already found.

Optional work that is not needed to rank the first review pool runs later. It never keeps the scan open past its terminal state.