YouTube

One thing to do

1. Give us your channel. In Toiling Away, open Connections -> add YouTube streaming, and paste your channel address or your @handle. There is nothing to sign in to and no password to type, because everything we read is already public.

Steam and Twitch both make you sign in, and this does not, which is a real difference rather than an oversight. Signing in to YouTube would mean asking Google for permission to read your account, and Google reviews the whole application before anyone can grant it. Reading what your channel already publishes needs none of that.

The cost is that nothing proves the channel is yours. Paste somebody else's and you will be credited for their streams, so please do not: it earns you nothing you could not earn by typing the hours in by hand, and it takes their channel away from them. A channel can only be connected to one account at a time.

What counts

Livestreams, once they have ended. Nothing appears while you are still live, and a long stream arrives all at once when you stop.

Ordinary uploads do not count. Editing and posting a video is work, but it is not work YouTube can time for us, so it is a job for the manual box rather than for this.

Time spent watching does not count either, and never will. This measures broadcasting.

An all-day stream counts in full. Other sources have a four hour ceiling per entry, because a timer left running overnight is usually a mistake; a fourteen hour broadcast is not a mistake, so it is counted as the several long stretches it was.

What you get to begin with

Your streams from the past month. We credit no further back than that whatever your channel holds, so a new connection starts with your recent streaming rather than your career.

None of it is estimated. Each broadcast carries the time it started and the time it ended, so what you are credited is what happened, on the days it happened.

Worth knowing

Overlaps are merged. An hour that YouTube and another source both cover counts once. Streaming with a work timer running does not earn twice.

Your viewers' time is theirs. We count the hours you spent broadcasting and nothing about who watched. Watch time is your audience's time, not yours to earn from.

More than one channel is fine. A personal channel and a project channel can both be connected to the same account, and both will be read.

Your channel is checked once a day rather than the moment you stop, so a stream that ended this morning may not show up until tomorrow.

About YouTube

Toiling Away is not endorsed by, sponsored by or affiliated with YouTube or Google. It reads what your channel publishes through the YouTube Data API, and YouTube decides what it shows and for how long. Visit YouTube.