Steff
The best video ideas are the ones your audience has already voted for. Every channel has a few videos that do far better than its usual. Those outliers show you what people in your niche want to watch right now.
You can find them by scrolling through channel after channel. Or you can pull the numbers into a spreadsheet and let the outliers stand out. This post shows the second way, and you can repeat it every week.
What you need
- Three to five channels in your niche. If you don't have a list yet, step 1 finds one.
- A Selextract account. The YouTube Video Scraper is ready-made, so there's nothing to build. Runs don't use AI; they run the same tested code every time.
- A spreadsheet: Google Sheets or Excel.
Step 1: Find the channels your audience watches
Open the scraper and enter your topic as a search term, for example home espresso. Set Search order to View count and Videos per search or channel to 30.
In the results, look at the channel_name column. Channels that show up several times are the ones your audience already watches. Pick three to five of them, ideally about your size or a little bigger. A giant channel's numbers say more about its fame than about the topic.
Step 2: Pull each channel's recent videos
Start a new run with the channels instead of a search term. You can enter handles like @channelname or channel links, up to five in one run. Set Videos per search or channel to 20. One run returns up to 100 videos, so five channels with 20 videos each fit.
You get one row per video:
| Column | What it holds |
|---|---|
title, url, video_id |
The video and its link |
views |
View count |
duration_seconds |
Length in seconds |
publication_date |
Upload date as YouTube shows it, often relative, like "3 weeks ago" |
channel_name, channel_link, subscribers |
The channel |
thumbnail_url |
The thumbnail image |
data_date |
When the run collected the row |
Download the results as CSV or Excel and open them in your spreadsheet.
Step 3: Score every video against its own channel
Raw views mislead. 50,000 views is a flop for a big channel and a hit for a small one. So compare each video with the median of its own channel.
Add a column called score with this formula:
=F2 / MEDIAN(FILTER(F:F, B:B = B2))
Here B is the channel_name column and F is views. Change the letters to match your file. The formula works in Google Sheets and Excel 365.
A score of 1 is a normal video for that channel. A score of 3 means three times its usual views. Sort by score, highest first.
Two habits keep the scores honest:
- Leave out videos from the last week or two. They haven't had time to collect views yet.
- Compare short and long videos separately. They often perform very differently. Use
duration_secondsto split them.
Step 4: Turn the outliers into ideas
Read the top ten titles and watch the first minute of each. You're looking for the reason a video worked, not a video to copy:
- The question it answers. What did the viewer want to know or fix?
- The promise in the title. A test, a comparison, a mistake to avoid, a result in a set time?
- The format. Tutorial, review, challenge, story?
Then make your own version, with a different angle, newer information or more depth. Say a video called "I tried the cheapest espresso machine" scores 4. The idea worth taking is the cheap-versus-expensive test, not that exact machine.
My rule of thumb: when the same idea scores high on two different channels, it's a topic, not luck.
Step 5: Run it every week
Your run is saved as a task in your account. Give it a weekly schedule, and new uploads from those channels show up in your results. You'll see which new videos take off while the idea is still fresh. You can add or swap channels any time.
If you'd rather work in code, you can start runs and fetch results through the API, or connect Selextract to an AI assistant through MCP.
Good to know
- Each run takes up to five searches, channels or videos and returns up to 100 videos.
- Comments and related videos aren't included.
- When YouTube doesn't show a value on the page, the field is empty. On search results that's often
subscribersand sometimesviews. Channel pages usually show both. - Runs use your own Selextract credit.