About YTDetective

What that means in practice

Where a result comes straight from YouTube's own public API — a channel ID, a video's tags, its stats, its thumbnail — we show exactly that, cached briefly so repeat lookups stay fast without hammering YouTube's quota. That's the Channel ID Finder, Tag Extractor, Metadata Viewer, and Thumbnail Downloader.

Where YouTube doesn't expose an official answer at all — whether a channel is monetized, whether it's being suppressed in search and recommendations — we don't pretend otherwise. The Monetization Checker and Shadowban Checker show a confidence score, a last-verified timestamp, and a plain explanation of what public signal the estimate is based on. If a result can't be verified, the honest answer is "we don't know for certain," not a confident-looking guess dressed up as fact.

The Money Calculator and the two Channel Name tools round out the set: a transparent, client-side revenue estimate, and niche-specific name ideas checked against live public handle availability — with zero YouTube API quota spent on either.

Who builds it

YTDetective is built and maintained by Alexander, an automation engineer. Every tool and every article comes from the same person, which is why there are few of them and why each one is checked.

Each guide names the YouTube Help or developer pages it relies on, with the date they were read, and says plainly what could not be verified. If something is wrong, tell us through the Contact page and it gets corrected.

What we're not

We're not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by YouTube or Google. "YouTube" is a trademark of Google LLC; we're an independent tool built against YouTube's public API and public pages. There are no user accounts, no paid tier, and the site is paid for by Google AdSense ads, which are shown only if you accept advertising cookies.

Questions or something looks wrong?

See the FAQ for common questions, or reach us through the Contact page — tool-result bug reports are especially welcome.