YouTube Browser Extension

I built, released, and maintain a browser extension that, for every comment under a YouTube video, shows the number of subscribers for the author of the comment.

One of the use cases is being able to quickly distinguish between comments that are actually contributing and being rewarded with likes, and those that are just getting likes because the author is well known.

The extension has around 4k users from both platforms as of early 2024.

You can see the Chrome web store listing here.
Per the request of a particular user, I have also created a Firefox listing here.

Because I find this interesting, I'm sure others will too. So here is the slowly growing user graph over the last 4 years:

Weekly active users graph since 1st March 2020 release.
(Chrome Web Store analytics kinda glitched out in Feb 2021 lol).

Weird how the end of each year seems to have a small drop in active users.

Technology

The extension is open source and can be found on Github.

It works by simply fetches the raw HTML of the /about page for each author and scrapes the string that contains the current subscriber count. Normally you can't just fetch the source of any HTML page within another due to CORS. However, because the /about page exists on the same youtube.com domain as the video, this is allowed.

While there exists an official YouTube API that can get this data, that would require maintaining a backend and might cost money.