2025-2026
YouTube Upload Monitor
Knowing whether a few hundred YouTube channels have posted anything means opening every one of them. In practice only the few somebody thinks to check ever get checked.
This walks the whole list every morning and leaves one short list behind: the channels that actually posted something.
One row per channel
The watchlist is a sheet, one row per channel, and each row remembers the last video that channel was seen with. A run takes them one at a time, asks YouTube what the newest upload on that channel is now, and compares it against what is written down.
It asks by playlist rather than by search. Every channel has an uploads playlist whose id is the channel id with two letters changed, so the newest upload is one cheap call away instead of a query that has to be paged through and filtered.
A Short is not an upload
A different video id is not enough on its own. A channel posting three Shorts a day would report a new upload every single morning and mean nothing by it, so anything that looks new gets a second call for its length, and a minute or under is written down as a Short and dropped.
A premiere comes back with no length at all, because it has not happened yet. Those are kept: a scheduled premiere is a real upload, and it is the one you most want to know about early. A channel that has been renamed, emptied or deleted gets its own status rather than being silently skipped, so a row that stops reporting says why.
Want to know more?
It is part of a bigger private setup. If you would like to find out more about it, contact me.