YouTube Insight reports provide video owners with statistics about their viewership above and beyond public view count information. They’re a crucial tool when you want to find out more about the demographic or regional breakdown of your videos’ viewership, or what sites are embedding your videos. The YouTube API has provided a way for developers to retrieve YouTube Insight reports in a comma-separated value format for some time now, but there are some recent additions to the Insight retrieval process that we wanted to highlight.First, we wanted to mention that the API allows developers to access Insight reports for an entire channel’s worth of videos, not just a single video. The appropriate base URL to use for downloading a channel report can be found when requesting the profile corresponding to the user who’s authenticated with the YouTube API, as described in our developer’s guide. The element looks something like:<link rel='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#insight.views' type='text/html' href='http://insight.youtube.com/video-analytics/csvreports?query=PlVJ88-zqkI&type=...'/>
It can be identified by the rel='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#insight.views' attribute. As with single-video Insight retrieval, these reports are only available to the corresponding owner, so authenticating as the correct user is a must.Current users of the Insight API know that we previously supported a rather restrictive set of custom date ranges for reports. We’re happy to announce that these restrictions have been relaxed—we now support date ranges that span 31 days (up from 28) and, more significantly, you can specify any arbitrary start date for your report going back to March 1, 2009. Please see our documentation for more information on formatting your custom date range parameters to take advantage of this historical data.As always, we’re waiting to hear from you in our developer forum with any questions or comments.Cheers,—Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team
