Free tool drop: pull your private YouTube analytics from the terminal

I just open-sourced the tool I built this week to pull my own channel's private metrics.

Not the public stuff. The real stuff YouTube Studio gatekeeps:

Retention curve with exact timestamps where people are dropping off
- Traffic source breakdown (subscribers vs browse vs search vs external links)
- Subscribers gained per video
- Watch time, avg % viewed, geo, age/gender

I ran it on my last upload and found out 50% of viewers were gone by 30 seconds. The biggest drop hit at the 20-second mark. That one number changed how I'm writing my next intro.

Here's the repo:

https://github.com/treycooper3/youtube-analytics-skill

Setup takes about 10 minutes (free Google Cloud project + one-time browser login). After that it's one command:

python3 tools/youtube_analytics.py

If you're on Claude Code, there's also a skill included. Drop it in ~/.claude/skills/ and just say "pull my YouTube analytics" and it does the work + gives you the "why it performed" read on top of the numbers.

Built this for myself, figured the community should have it too.

Drop any questions below and I'll help you get it running.

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Free tool drop: pull your private YouTube analytics from the terminal