问题
I've been working with the demographics queries available in the YouTube Analytics API and was hoping you could shed some light on the following situation:
- If I ask for demographics for a channel for a day where the channel had around 2000 views or less, I get no rows returned.
- If I ask for 3 such days in separate queries, I still get no demographic data returned.
- But if I ask for all 3 days in a single query that spans the days, I do get demographic data
So it seems like there's an imposed minimum number of views that a query needs to cover before demographic data will be returned by the API, even when other methods show there is some demog data avilable. Am I understanding this correctly? Is the API supposed to behave this way?
[Update: I originally stated that the Analytics dashboard was not matching the API on thi, when in fact they return the same results, so I've updated the title and the description.]
回答1:
I can confirm that this is the intended behavior of both the API and the YouTube Analytics web interface.
回答2:
This makes sense from a statistical point of view. Most statistics have a margin of error, a bigger sample helps reduce this. If there isn't enough data the analytics wouldn't be accurate. It would be possible to show those analytics (for smaller numbers) if they also included their margin of errors, but if the margin of error is too high the data would be useless. However, it should be possible to extrapolate the data for day "N" using the demographics for (N-3,N) and (N-3,N-1) and total views for those ranges (plus for day "N") (considering there is demographic data the ranges) by subtracting the demographics of the 3day range from the 4day range.
For example (assuming 10k views/day), if the 4day range has 75% green viewers out of 40,000 you have 30,000 green (lizard-people) viewers in the past 4 days. If the 3day (3 days right before day "N") range has 87.5% green viewers out of 30,000 total, you have 26,250 green viewers in that range. By subtracting, 4day-range from 3day-range you're left with 3,750 green viewers for day "N", and since day "N" has 10k views, that means 37.5% of those views are from green lizard-people.
It should work, but I wouldn't trust that data to have a reliable margin of error. (please don't use this if it's for something important)
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14694483/youtube-analytics-api-demographics-minimum-views-seem-to-be-required-for-query