Discovering YouTube Creators

Creator Discovery finds YouTube channels that recently published a video about a topic you care about, for example a game like yours, and lets you import them into your CRM for outreach.

Where it lives

Open CRM and press Discover creators. Each search runs in the background and shows up in Your searches with its status. We notify you when it finishes.

Writing a phrase

Words are compared without regard to case or accents. Not supported: excluding a word, wildcards, and forms like gaming when you typed game.

What is matched

Every word must appear in at least one of these fields of a video from the last N days:

• the video title
• the full video description
• the video tags
• the channel name
• the channel description

The sample

YouTube returns up to 50 videos per page for a phrase inside the time window, and a search fetches as many pages as Videos to fetch asks for: 50, 100 or 250 videos (one, two or five pages). A vague phrase gives you a vague sample, so a specific phrase with a couple of alternatives usually finds more relevant channels than a single broad word. Two more settings shape the sample before any filter runs:

• Fetch order: Most relevant is YouTube's own ranking, which favors large channels. Newest first takes the latest uploads, where small channels are the majority. Automatic picks Newest first when Max is 100,000 or less, and Most relevant otherwise (including no limit).
• Gaming videos only: keeps the sample inside YouTube's Gaming category, so a phrase like "scary" does not fill the sample with horror films. It is on by default; turn it off for phrases outside games.

Every crawl of a phrase, whatever its sort or category setting, feeds every later search of that phrase: the word match and your filters run on the whole pool.

Depth and Fetch more

Each page costs 100 units of the daily YouTube budget, so the form shows the most a search can spend, and how much is left today, before you run it. A search fetches its pages over a few minutes: the list shows In progress with how many videos are in hand, and the results already found appear while the rest arrive. When YouTube has no page after the last one, the search says so and stops early.

A finished search offers Fetch more above its results and in its empty state: it queues the same search one step deeper (50, 100, 250, then 500 videos), continuing from where the phrase's crawl stands, so the button names how many videos it adds and the most it can cost. The crawl continues as long as the phrase was crawled in the last 24 hours; after that it fetches the whole amount again, and the button prices it that way (shortly before the 24 hours run out it already prices the whole amount, because the queued search waits for the next run). Small channels rarely make the first page of a broad phrase, so fetching more is often the fix when matched channels were all too large.

When the budget runs out

Every workspace has its own daily budget of 3,000 quota units (30 pages of 50 videos, or six searches of 250 videos), inside a budget of 9,000 that all workspaces share; both reset at midnight Pacific time. A search that meets either budget mid-crawl keeps the pages it fetched and finishes with them; the list and the notification say where it stopped. The next day, Fetch the remaining videos above its results queues the same search again: it continues from where it stopped as long as the phrase was crawled in the last 24 hours, otherwise it starts again from the first page. A search that could not fetch a single page waits in the queue for the next day's budget. A search that finds no budget for 7 days is marked Failed, and so is one whose runs kept timing out; either way we notify you, and Search again queues it afresh.

Filters

• Published within: only videos from the last 7, 30, 60 or 90 days count.
• Subscribers: pick a channel size or type a Min and Max; leave Max empty for no limit. Channels outside the range are left out. A channel that hides its subscriber count is kept and marked Needs review.
• Language: a preference passed to YouTube, not a strict filter. Leave it on Any language unless most results come back in a language you cannot use.
• Exclude Shorts: skips videos up to a minute long, and videos up to three minutes with #shorts in the title, so only regular videos count.

Quota and reuse

Searches spend a daily YouTube budget (see When the budget runs out), so they queue and run in the background, usually within a few minutes. A phrase searched by anyone in the last 24 hours with the same Fetch order and Gaming videos only settings, to at least the depth you ask for, is reused for free: changing your subscriber range or narrowing the window reuses the videos already fetched, while a wider window, a new phrase, or a different fetch order or category runs a fresh YouTube search, and a deeper search fetches only the pages that are missing. Results from earlier crawls of the same phrase stay in the sample as long as their video is inside your window, so repeating a search accumulates channels instead of replacing them.

Reading the funnel line

Each finished search shows three numbers: how many videos YouTube returned (and across how many pages, for a search that fetched more than one; a search that continued an earlier crawl names the pages it added and the whole sample), how many channels matched your phrase (counting earlier crawls of the same phrase that are still inside your window), and how many of those passed your filters. When a search finds nothing, the page tells you which of the three stages emptied it and offers to fetch more videos, to search again with a wider subscriber range, a wider window, the newest videos first or every category, or to change the phrase.

Word coverage

Under the funnel line, each word of your phrase shows in how many of the fetched videos it appeared, for example popular 2 · horror 41 · video 27 · games 44 for a sample of 50. Because every word must appear, no more channels can match than the rarest word allows: here popular capped the search at two videos. A word that appears in fewer than one video in five is named as the one limiting the results, as long as the phrase has another word to keep, and the page offers to search again without it (a fresh YouTube search). Qualifiers such as popular, best or top are the usual culprits: creators rarely write them, so leave them out and let the subscriber range stand for popularity. A search that reuses a cached crawl shows the coverage of that crawl.

Importing

Press Import to add the channels you did not dismiss to your CRM. Channels already in your CRM, and creators who asked not to be contacted, are skipped automatically. Every imported contact records the lawful basis you choose in the import dialog.