How to Inventory a YouTube Channel

This guide will teach you the process of creating a YouTube inventory. It is very detailed and can be easily followed. By the time you finish reading this guide, you will be well on your way to creating your first YouTube inventory.

Task Checklist

Information that you will need:

  1. YouTube channel to work on.
  2. Additional instructions, if any. Don’t be afraid to ask.

Tools that you will need:

  1. New Google Sheet with the template copied to it.
  2. Timestamp Removal Tool.
  3. Word Counter or MS Word (Use any of these options to count the words).

Steps:

  1. Go to the “Videos” page of the YouTube channel and load the videos one at a time.
  2. Familiarize yourself with the information you need to gather and where it is.
  3. Copy the following in the appropriate column of the sheet:
    1. Video name,
    2. URL,
    3. Date,
    4. Name of the featured speaker,
    5. Do a Google search to confirm First Page and Video Ranking,
    6. URLs of the LinkedIn and Twitter accounts of the featured speaker,
    7. Video’s view count,
    8. Video’s duration,
    9. Video’s word count,
  4. Repeat the process until you add all videos to the inventory completely.
  5. Accomplish the Summary tab.

Estimated time it takes on average to add each video to the inventory:

The total time it will take you to add all the videos to the inventory will largely depend on how many videos there are to add, but the time it will take you to add each video and accomplish the cells in the columns should not exceed one minute and 45 seconds.

If you’re taking longer than that per video, you need to identify what you are doing wrong and improve on it. Ask yourself which step is consuming more time than necessary, and work on it to be more efficient. The faster, the better, but accuracy is essential. The data will be used to analyze the channel, so bad data equals bad analysis.

Before you begin...

This task involves creating an inventory of all the videos (content) a particular YouTube channel has. This means that you will be listing all the videos on the channel, which also includes YouTube Shorts. You will be sent a link to a Google Sheet, which contains the template that we are using. You should copy the tabs that are on that template and paste them onto a new Google Sheet. Save it under the name of the Client, so it will be easy to track.

The information that you are required to collect includes the Descript Video Name, Date the video was posted, URL, Featured Speaker (if the client is being interviewed by someone or if the client is interviewing somebody), First Page, Video Ranking, Featured Speaker Twitter Account, Featured Speaker LinkedIn Account, Views, Video Length, BW Blog URL, Word Count, and File Name. Some of these items will be explained below.

Before you begin, it is important to prepare everything that you will need to get the job done. To start with, you should have the YouTube page and the Google Sheet loaded already in your browser. Starting the task in an organized manner sets you up for a successful completion of the task. We will use the “Home Service Expert” YouTube channel as an example (image below). 

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Step 1: Go to the Videos page and load the first video on the list
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Step 2: Gather the information needed

This is a YouTube Shorts video. Some of the information that you will need to gather will not be available here because of the way the Shorts are displayed. You will not see the view count, the video length, or the transcript here, so we will have to edit the URL a bit. We need to gain access to the transcript because we need to count how many words were spoken in the video. To do that, replace the “shorts/” in the URL with “watch?v=” and press enter. You are only required to do this for videos that are Shorts. Normal YouTube videos already give you access to all the information that you need to populate the columns on the sheet.

Before: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Uo0NI3hQ2B8
After: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo0NI3hQ2B8

After editing the URL, the page will now look like this.

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As you can see, there is more information available when we change the url to watch?v=. Now, we already have what we need to populate some of the columns.
Step 3: Copy the video name and paste it in the appropriate column
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Step 4: Copy the URL and paste it in the appropriate column
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Step 5: Copy the date and paste it in the appropriate column
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Step 6: Copy the name of the featured speaker and paste it in the appropriate column
We’re going to use another video to explain how to find the name of the speaker because the video above doesn’t feature anyone else. In the video below, the client is interviewing someone. As you can see, his name, Trey McWilliams, is displayed on the screen.
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Some YouTubers go out of their way to make their content excellent in every possible way. As you can see below, Tommy was thorough enough to include Trey's name as well as additional information about him in the description for the benefit of viewers. You should always check the description for additional details that you can use to find social media accounts such as LinkedIn and Twitter in this case. Please note that when the client is all alone in the video, you should input the client’s name as the featured speaker in the sheet. So, now you have the name. Add it to the sheet.
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Step 7: Do a Google search to confirm First Page and Video Ranking
At this step, you’re looking to see whether or not the featured speaker shows up on the first page of a Google search in association with the client or his company. When the author of this guide searched for the term “Trey McWilliams” on Google, something about our client showed up under images within the first page of the search results. We can count this as a positive result, so we should input “1st” under the First Page column. If the result is negative, input “n/a”.
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As for the Video Ranking column, you’re looking to see if the specific video you’re working on shows up on the first page of the same Google search. If it does, input “1st” under Video Ranking. Input “n/a” if the result is negative.

For videos where the client is alone, you should input his/her own LinkedIn and Twitter accounts in the columns.

Step 8: Copy the URLs of the LinkedIn and Twitter accounts of the featured speaker and paste them in the appropriate columns

Continuing on from the Google search above, you should also check if the speaker’s LinkedIn and Twitter accounts show up in the search results because you will need to add the links to those as well to the sheet. If the LinkedIn and Twitter accounts show up immediately in the search results, you’re in luck. Just add them to the sheet. If you encounter any difficulty in locating the accounts, the tips below should help.

Every time there is another person in the video, especially if it’s an interview, you need to get the name of the person as well as find their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. To accomplish that, a Google search will be necessary unless the information is already given somewhere in the video or in the video’s description. However, more often than not, you will have to do a Google search.

Doing a Google search using just a name will yield a lot of results. We need to make the search more specific, so that the results on the first page will already offer something useful to help you find what you’re looking for. If you’ll look at the video description above, it also includes the company that Trey is connected with. In this case, it’s his own company, which is “McWilliams and Son Heating and Air Conditioning.” To do a Google search using all the available information we already have, we can construct our search term to look something like this: “Trey McWilliams” “McWilliams and Son Heating and Air Conditioning” Enclosing the words in quotes tells Google to look for the exact term/s. This method will yield better results.

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As you can see in the image above, Google provided us with the most relevant results on the first page with the suggested LinkedIn account at the top of the results. Click on the LinkedIn link at the top, and check if the account owner and the one being interviewed in the video are one and the same. You have to be careful here because some names are just too common and can easily mislead you into thinking that the account you’re looking at is the correct one. Make sure that it’s the same person. Once you’ve verified that it’s the correct LinkedIn account, add the URL to the sheet.
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Before leaving the LinkedIn page, you might as well check if the person included a link to his Twitter account on the Contact Info of his LinkedIn account. See below to get an idea of how to get to the Contact Info page on a LinkedIn account.
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It just so happens that Trey doesn’t have a Twitter account, so we simply input n/a in the sheet. Some people who use LinkedIn don’t include a link to their Twitter account on their Contact Info page for whatever reason, so you will have to search for that on Google every time the information is not available on the Contact Info page. A good place to go look for the Twitter account would be the person’s personal website or company page under About Us or Contact Us. Once you find the link to the Twitter account, add it to the sheet under the appropriate column. If there is no account, just put n/a or “No account found.”
Step 9: Copy the video’s view count and paste it in the appropriate column
Let’s go back to the Shorts video we started with to explain this step. Get the view count, and add it to the sheet in the appropriate column.
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The view count doesn’t match here because the video got more views since the inventory was created.
Step 10: Copy the video’s duration and paste it in the appropriate column
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It originally displayed 0:27. That is why the cell is reflecting 0:00:27 even if the duration on the screenshot states 0:00:26.
Step 11: Copy the video’s word count and paste it in the appropriate column
This step is a bit complicated because you will have to use some tools to get the word count. It is not practical to count the words manually, so we need to use tools. First, we need to load the transcript of the video. This is how to do that.
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Once you click on Show Transcript, this is what it will look like.
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What you should do here is highlight all the text in the box starting from the first timestamp up to the last, and copy it by clicking on it with the right mouse button and then selecting copy. You can also press CTRL+C on your keyboard to copy it.

Next, go to https://anatolt.ru/t/del-timestamp-srt.html and paste the text in the box on the left. Then, press “Do the job!” to remove the timestamps. We don’t need to include those in the count.

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It will look something like this once the timestamps have been removed.
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You’ll notice that the timestamps are gone in the box on the right side. Copy the text in the box and go to https://wordcounter.net/ to count the words. Just paste it in the box, and it will automatically count the words. You’ll see below that the words are automatically counted for us.
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Just copy the number and paste it on the sheet in the appropriate column.
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You can also use MS Word to count the words, especially for large amounts of text. The website above tends to hang in such cases. Just paste the text into MS Word and look at the bottom of the page to see the word count.
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Step 12: Repeat the process
Just repeat the process for all the videos until you completely add them all.
Step 13: Accomplish the Summary tab
Upon completion of the inventory, you need to update the Summary tab.
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You can edit the following manually: Analysis Up to Date as of, YouTube Videos, and YouTube channel views. However, the cells for Total Duration and Total Words are computed using a formula embedded in the cells. To update those cells, expand the arrows below.
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It will look something like this after.
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For the video length column, go back to the other tab and copy the video lengths of all the videos and paste it under the appropriate column in the Summary tab. Do the same for Word Count.

Please make sure that the formula captures all the cells that are populated under the related column. For Video Length, for example, this is what the formula embedded in the cell looks like.

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As you can see, it is only considering values from cells F2 to F533. If the number of videos you worked on exceeds that, the data beyond F533 will not be included in the count, which will result in an inaccurate value. You should be mindful about that always and edit the formula when needed for both columns.

Lastly, you should also compute how long it took you to finish the job right down to the cost of each entry you added. Please accomplish the following as well to complete the required information: Time to completion, Time per entry, and Cost per entry.

Finally, all you have to do now is to get the URL of the sheet and include it in your report.

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That's it. You're done. Good job!
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Verification Checklist

The inventory must meet the following criteria:

#1. The Google Sheet is a new sheet, a separate file.

#2. The sheet includes all the necessary columns such as:

  • Descript
  • Video Name
  • Date
  • URL
  • Ft. Speaker
  • First Page
  • Video Ranking
  • Ft. Speaker Twitter
  • Ft. Speaker LinkedIn
  • Views
  • Video Length
  • BW Blog URL
  • Word Count
  • File Name

#3. Columns are populated when the information is available.

#4. All featured speakers are added to the inventory

#5. All videos on the channel, including #shorts, are in the inventory.

#6. The Summary tab is already accomplished with all the cells updated including the ones related to cost.