Perl script monitors visitor statistics for YouTube movies

Chart Stormers

Article from Issue 171/2015
Author(s):

Hobby YouTuber Mike Schilli is interested in whether his videos go viral. What better way to check skyrocketing viewer numbers than letting a Perl script analyze the daily trends and watch for unexpected upswings?

When a hardware hacker like myself faces a seemingly unsolvable mechanical problem – for example, when a gadget resists warranty-invalidating opening – you can typically find a solution on YouTube. And, if you need to use a less-than-intuitive program like GIMP, you will typically find an expert screencast on YouTube to help you solve complex problems, even as a newbie.

Dreamship

When I recently managed to use GIMP's Scissor Select tool successfully, I decided to create a screencast. Then, I waited for this masterpiece of movie magic to hit the charts on YouTube. I initially set monthly reminder dates in Evernote to check the number of views by hand at regular intervals. However, that got old pretty quickly, so thanks to the CPAN WebService::GData::YouTube module, I managed to fully automate the process.

For this to happen, the YAML file in Listing 1 lists the IDs of the movies to monitor [1]. I simply extracted the hex numbers from my videos' YouTube URLs. For example, the _Cxu3-UP0G8 string for the GIMP video was simply cut and pasted from the URL line in the browser displayed in Figure 1.

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