YouTube Analytics shows a channel's audience in detail, but only to the channel owner. Brands, agencies and analytics tools need the same picture for channels they don't own: before sponsoring a creator, you want to know whether their viewers are in your market and age range. This guide covers how to get an estimate for any public channel.
The quick way: the live demo
The Audience demographics endpoint page has a free live demo on a sample channel, so you can see the exact response before creating an account. With a free account you get 100 credits, enough to check two channels of your own choosing.
The scalable way: the API
For many channels, or inside your own product, use the Audience demographics endpoint:
curl "https://socialgraph.dev/api/v1/youtube/audience?channelId=UC_x5XG1OV2P6uZZ5FSM9Ttw" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" --max-time 90
The response returns percentages for:
audienceCountry: share per country, largest firstaudienceGender:maleandfemaleaudienceAge: seven groups from 13–17 to 65+audienceAgeGender: each age group split by genderaudienceLanguageandaudienceCategory(content interests, as YouTube category IDs)
pageInfo.status is success when an audience could be estimated. Channels with too little public engagement return insufficient_engagement with zeros, and are not charged.
Finding the channel ID
Use the Channels endpoint with forHandle=@name to turn a handle into the UC… channel ID, or open the channel on YouTube → About → Share channel → Copy channel ID.
How to use the numbers
Demographics are most useful as a comparison:
- Fit: compare the audience's top countries and age groups with your campaign's target. A 300K channel with 70% of viewers in your market beats a 3M channel with 5%.
- Shortlists: score candidate channels on the share of audience that matches your target, and sort.
- Sanity checks: a channel whose audience doesn't match its content niche deserves a closer look.
The figures are estimates generated from publicly available signals, expressed as percentages. Treat them as comparative, not as exact head counts, and remember they are not the owner's private Analytics.
Cost and timing
A call takes 20–60 seconds, because the estimate is computed fresh for each channel, and costs 50 credits (US$0.10). Set a 90-second timeout and cache results for a few days; audiences change slowly.