I’ve spent the past 15 minutes trying — and failing — to write an introduction to Subscriber War, a neat python-based Terminal app that helps you monitor YouTube channel subscriber counts.
I’m aware that most of you don’t need to, want to, or care to track the engorged subscriber counts of popular YouTube channels.
And when curiosity does bite, and you find yourself wanting to see who’s picking up more followers compared to whomever else, a quick ‘new tab’ in a web browser will probably suffice.
This app isn’t a must-have. I know that — but it is, in my opinion, pretty darn cool:
I’m (sadly) aware that the subscriber count for our own YouTube channel is on the wane (but with the last proper video posted a year ago, that’s hardly unexpected). I’ll be using this tool to track our own sub count, as well as those of other channels I dig, like the Linux Gamer, Gaming on Linux and World of GNOME.
Download Subscriber War
Subscriber War is a free, open-source command line app. It is available to download from Github.
Note that you need to create a (free) YouTube API key to play with it.
Once set up, configure the channels you tracks (and which color they appear as in the terminal) using the following function in the subWar.py file at or around line 66:
addUser(<NAME TO DISPLAY>,<CHANNEL ID>,<COLOR>)Note that the channel ID is not the same as the channel username. Your own channel ID is listed under your account settings. Ours looks like this:
addUser("OMG! Ubuntu!", "UCIiSwcm9xiFb3Y4wjzR41eQ", curses.COLOR_ORANGE + 1)
You can use an online tool to find the YouTube channel ID of any channel. Google “Youtube Username to Channel ID Converter” to find a particularly nifty one.