youtube-trending-scanner

youtube-trending-scanner is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from nikhilbhansali/youtube-data-skills. It costs 114 tokens per session (979 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A YouTube trend scanner that searches a topic over a recent time window to find breakout videos, rising channels, and emerging subjects. A breakout video is gaining views unusually quickly compared with its normal performance.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to monitor a niche, find promising channels and videos, identify rising phrases and topics, and compare video formats and publishing rates.
Why use it?
It helps separate genuinely fast-growing content from videos that only have a large accumulated view count.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to monitor a niche, find promising channels and videos, identify rising phrases and topics, and compare video formats and publishing rates.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nikhilbhansali/youtube-data-skills/youtube-trending-scanner
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add nikhilbhansali/youtube-data-skills --skill youtube-trending-scanner
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nikhilbhansali/youtube-data-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for youtube-trending-scanner

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nikhilbhansali/youtube-data-skills/youtube-trending-scanner/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nikhilbhansali/youtube-data-skills/youtube-trending-scanner)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nikhilbhansali/youtube-data-skills/youtube-trending-scanner"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nikhilbhansali/youtube-data-skills/youtube-trending-scanner/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for youtube-trending-scanner

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nikhilbhansali/youtube-data-skills/youtube-trending-scanner"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nikhilbhansali/youtube-data-skills/youtube-trending-scanner.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 114 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 979 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00114 $0.00979
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.00490
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00196
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00098

Measured 12d ago against content hash f91be85dbfe8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

youtube-trending-scanner scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/scan_trending.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/youtube-trending-scanner/SKILL.md · 123 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 123 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Scan what's trending right now in any YouTube niche -- find breakout videos, rising channels, and emerging topics.

Usage

/youtube-trending-scanner "meditation"
/youtube-trending-scanner "AI tools" --days 14
/youtube-trending-scanner "home cooking" --days 30

Instructions

Step 1: Parse Arguments

  • Niche/keyword (required): the niche to scan
  • --days N (optional): time window to scan (default: 14, max: 30)

Step 2: Get the API Key

Check Claude memory for a YouTube Data API v3 key. If not found, ask:

"I need a YouTube Data API v3 key. You can get one from the Google Cloud Console. Please paste your key."

Step 3: Run the Bundled Script

Run scripts/scan_trending.py — resolve the path relative to this skill's own directory:

YT_API_KEY=API_KEY python3 <skill-dir>/scripts/scan_trending.py "NICHE" [--days N]

Dependency: pip3 install google-api-python-client.

The script searches the window three ways (relevance, viewCount, date), pulls a 90-day baseline for comparison, then computes velocity outliers, rising channels, trending words/bigrams, format distribution, and publishing-rate change.

Step 4: Read the Data

reports/data/trending-scan-<niche-slug>-<YYYY-MM-DD>.json

Step 5: Write the Report

Write to the path the script printed:

reports/trending-scan-<niche-slug>-<YYYY-MM-DD>.md
# Trending Scanner: [Niche]
*Scanned [date] | Last [N] days | [N] videos analyzed*

## Hot Right Now
Overall trend assessment: Is this niche heating up, stable, or cooling down?
Compare recent publishing rate vs baseline.

## Breakout Videos (Velocity Outliers)
| # | Title | Views | Velocity (views/day) | Channel | Channel Size | Age |
|---|-------|-------|---------------------|---------|--------------|-----|
These videos are getting disproportionate views. What do they have in common?

## Trending Topics
Words and phrases appearing frequently in recent high-performing content.
Topic clusters and emerging themes.

## Rising Channels
Small channels getting unusual traction right now.
| Channel | Subs | Recent Videos | Recent Views | Avg View/Sub Ratio |
|---------|------|---------------|--------------|-------------------|

## Format Trends
What formats are being used? Which are performing best?
Shorts vs long-form breakdown.

## Content Velocity
- Current niche publishing rate vs baseline
- Is competition increasing or decreasing?
- Saturation signals

## Timely Content Recommendations
3-5 specific video ideas based on current trends:
- What to make THIS WEEK
- Why (data backing)
- Format and angle recommendation

## Trend Assessment
- Growing / Stable / Declining
- First-mover opportunities
- Risks and considerations

## Quota Usage
| Operation | Calls | Units |
|-----------|-------|-------|
Use the `quota_used.breakdown` block from the JSON.

Read the full file on GitHub · 123 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 123 lines · 114 tokens per session scan A f91be85dbfe8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

youtube-trending-scanner is a skill published in the GitHub repository nikhilbhansali/youtube-data-skills (2 stars, last pushed 25d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 114 tokens to every session and 979 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

local-ai-agents

Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…

microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners · 200 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

chat-pet-sprite-creation

Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.

microsoft/vscode · 53 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

insight-error-page

Write or audit an insight-kind error page for the Next.js dev overlay. Use when creating a new errors/ .mdx page, auditing an existing one, or checking that a page matches the framework fix cards. Covers page structure, title alignment, FixCard cards with Copy prompt button, code snippets, terminology verification…

vercel/next.js · 83 tokens