Track competitor YouTube uploads every week and send them to Slack or Google Sheets

Description and use

Automated weekly collection of new competitor videos from YouTube, extraction of key metrics, and delivery to Slack or Google Sheets.

Problem

Competitor tracking is often skipped because manually checking many channels is tedious and error‑prone.

Outcome

A lightweight, cost‑efficient weekly pipeline that retrieves only new uploads, avoids re‑billing for old videos, and produces actionable metrics for competitor analysis.

Workflow

• 1. Create Apify task using the provided JSON input with channel URLs and "publishedAfter": "7 days".
• 2. Set "maxResults": 0 to let the date filter limit results.
• 3. Schedule the task to run weekly in Apify.
• 4. (Optional) Use the curl command to trigger the task from a cron job and save the JSON output.
• 5. Run the provided Python compare.py script on the two latest JSON files to compute per‑channel statistics such as uploads, median length, title length, age, and median views.
• 6. Send the summary to Slack or import into Google Sheets for further analysis.

Evidence

Once a week, fetch only the videos each channel published in the last seven days, store them, and compare with last week.

Source

Reading uploads costs about 1 quota unit per 50 videos. A search page costs 100, so do not build this on search.

Source

Best Damn YouTube Scraper does that through its publishedAfter input. Paging stops as soon as older videos appear, and billing is per delivered video, so the back catalogue is never delivered and never billed.

Source