Who writes this

All content on this site is written by Shiv N, who also builds and maintains the tool. There is no editorial team and no contributor network. Where an article carries a byline, it is that one person; where it does not, it is still that one person.

This matters for how you should read the guides. They reflect working experience with the YouTube Data API and with playlist structure, not academic research or proprietary data.

How claims are sourced

Every factual claim published here must be one of:

• Documented behaviour of the YouTube Data API or the YouTube product, linked to the relevant documentation.
• Arithmetic a reader can check themselves, with the inputs shown — for example, how long a 12-hour playlist takes at 1.5×.
• Reasoning from mechanism, clearly framed as such: explaining why something plausibly works, without attaching a number to it.

A statistic with no source does not get published. If we cannot attribute a figure, we say so in the text rather than quietly rounding it into something that sounds authoritative.

What we will not publish

• Invented statistics, including plausible-sounding percentages with no origin.
• Case studies about people who do not exist, or outcomes that were not observed.
• Claims of original research we did not conduct.
• Testimonials, ratings, or review counts that no one submitted.
• Usage figures we cannot substantiate from analytics.

A correction we owe you

This policy was written in response to a real problem rather than as a formality. Earlier versions of this site published material that violated every rule above: an article describing a study of "2.3 million YouTube videos" that was never conducted, case studies attributed to a named academic who does not exist, review ratings in the page markup that no user ever left, and usage statistics that were simply invented.

All of it has been removed. The two articles built entirely on fabricated research were withdrawn rather than patched. Unsourced statistics elsewhere were replaced with reasoning that can be checked, or with an explicit statement that the figure is not knowable from public data. The fabricated rating markup was deleted from every page.

We are documenting this rather than quietly fixing it because a site that asks you to trust its calculations should be honest about having got something badly wrong.

Corrections and updates

Substantive corrections are recorded in the changelog rather than made silently. Pages carry a last-updated date. If you find something wrong, tell us through the contact form — a specific pointer is more useful than a general complaint, and gets fixed faster.

How the tool's own numbers are derived is documented separately on the methodology page.

Advertising and independence

The site is free to use and is funded by display advertising. Ads are served by a third-party network; we do not choose which advertisers appear, and no advertiser has any input into what is written here. There are no sponsored posts and no affiliate links. If that changes, this section changes with it and the change is logged.