What we collect, and what we don't

The Contentine Brief is a read-only observatory of public YouTube activity. We watch channels, measure how videos perform against their own history, and publish the standouts. This page explains exactly what data moves through the service — both YouTube's and yours.

YouTube data we use

We access the YouTube Data API to read public information only: video titles, publish dates, durations, public view/like/comment counts, and channel metadata (name, subscriber count, uploads list). We take no private data, we require no viewer to sign in, and we never ask for or receive any YouTube user's credentials or authorized (OAuth) data. By using this site you are also bound by the YouTube Terms of Service, and our use of Google data adheres to the Google Privacy Policy.

What we store, and for how long

For each tracked channel we keep periodic snapshots of public view counts so we can build a per-channel baseline — that longitudinal measurement is the whole product. Raw per-video snapshots are pruned on a rolling schedule (roughly 120 days for the fine-grained series); the derived baselines and the record of a video having broken out are kept longer so the archive stays coherent. Any video that becomes private, is deleted, or whose channel removes it is dropped from our store on the next refresh. We do not cache YouTube thumbnails or re-host video content; the player you see is YouTube's own privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie embed, loaded only when you click play.

Attribution

Every video we surface links to its original YouTube watch page, and every number is labeled as being measured against that same channel's own baseline. We do not present YouTube data as our own, and we do not imply YouTube endorses us.

Your data as a reader

Reading the Brief requires no account. If you subscribe to a digest we store the email address and the desk you chose, solely to send that digest; every email carries a one-click unsubscribe and we honor it immediately. We serve no third-party ad networks, set no cross-site tracking cookies, and run no external analytics scripts — the only counts we keep are our own first-party page and click tallies, which are aggregate and not tied to your identity. Advertising, where present, is a single text line we typeset ourselves; it carries no scripts.

Requests and removals

Creators who want their channel excluded from tracking, and anyone with a data or abuse question, can write to hostmaster@brief.contentine.ai. Subscribers can remove their email at any time via the unsubscribe link or by writing to the same address.

This policy may be updated as the service evolves; material changes will be reflected here.