Weekly
Find the videos taking off in your niche
Each Monday you see which recent videos on your topic or from rival channels beat their usual views, with a note on why.
- Runs
- Weekly
- Apps
- YouTube
- AI
- Yes, uses the built-in AI allowance
- Access
- API key (public read)
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: every Monday, find last week's videos about 'home espresso' and new uploads from these 5 channels that got at least 3x their channel's usual views, and email me the top 10 with a short AI note on each.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
Most creators find out a format is taking off when three competitors have already posted it. A reaction video format, a listicle style or a new camera angle spreads quickly, and the signal is in a small number of videos that suddenly get several times their channel's normal views. Spotting those means watching dozens of channels by hand, which nobody sustains.
Each week, recent videos are searched by your keywords, and competitor channels' uploads are read. View counts are compared with each channel's average, stored from earlier weeks, so a video at five times its channel's norm is flagged as an outlier. ClickRuntime's built-in AI writes a short analysis, and it arrives by email.
Creators planning their next uploads, and agencies advising clients on content strategy, tend to use it each Monday.
What you get out of it
Outliers show what the audience wants
A video far above its channel's average is a sign that the topic or format struck a nerve, which tells you what to test in your own work. Learning from other people's hits is cheaper than testing every idea on your own audience.
Size of channel does not matter
Comparing each video against its own channel's average means a small channel's breakout hit is spotted, not just the videos from huge accounts. That keeps the report useful whether you run a tiny channel or a very large one.
Competitors' moves are visible
Reading what rivals published and how it performed every week keeps you aware of their strategy without having to follow each channel. Awareness of their strategy helps you differentiate instead of copying by accident.
Less time on manual research
A short written analysis replaces an evening of searching and scrolling, and you can spend that time planning the video instead. A planning evening gets shorter, and the ideas you choose rest on evidence.
Trends are seen while they are young
A weekly look catches a format when it is only a few videos old, which gives you time to make your version before the topic is crowded. Being early on a format is worth far more than being right after everyone else has joined.
How it works
What happens, step by step
Every Monday, ClickRuntime searches YouTube for recent videos on your topic and checks the channels you watch.
It compares each video's views with what that channel usually gets, and keeps the ones doing far better than normal.
AI looks at the standout videos and writes three bullet points on what they have in common.
You get an email listing each video with how many times its usual views it got, its channel and link, followed by the AI notes.
Before it runs live
- Connect YouTube
What you get
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.
Changes you can ask for
- Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
- Change what the AI looks for, or how it writes the result
- Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
- Combine it with other YouTube steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
from datetime import datetime, timedelta, timezone
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, ai, notify
YT = "https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3"
KEYWORD = "home espresso"
@on_trigger
def run(event):
key = credentials.secret("YOUTUBE_API_KEY")
since = (datetime.now(timezone.utc) - timedelta(days=7)).strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")
found = http.get(f"{YT}/search", params={"key": key, "part": "id", "q": KEYWORD, "type": "video",
"order": "viewCount", "publishedAfter": since, "maxResults": 25}).json()["items"]
ids = ",".join(v["id"]["videoId"] for v in found)
videos = http.get(f"{YT}/videos", params={"key": key, "part": "snippet,statistics", "id": ids}).json()["items"]
ch_ids = ",".join({v["snippet"]["channelId"] for v in videos})
channels = {c["id"]: c["statistics"] for c in http.get(f"{YT}/channels", params={"key": key, "part": "statistics", "id": ch_ids}).json()["items"]}
rows = []
for v in videos:
ch = channels[v["snippet"]["channelId"]]
avg = int(ch["viewCount"]) / max(int(ch["videoCount"]), 1)
ratio = int(v["statistics"].get("viewCount", 0)) / max(avg, 1)
if ratio >= 3:
rows.append(f"{ratio:.1f}x {v['snippet']['title']} ({v['snippet']['channelTitle']}) https://youtu.be/{v['id']}")
if not rows:
return {"outliers": 0}
why = ai.generate("\n".join(rows), system="In 3 bullet points, say what these outperforming videos have in common.", max_output_tokens=250).text
notify.email_me(f"{len(rows)} outlier videos: {KEYWORD}", "\n".join(rows) + "\n\n" + why)
return {"outliers": len(rows)}FAQ
Common questions
How does it decide a video is an outlier?
Do I need to list competitor channels?
Why does the first week look sparse?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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