YouTube Analytics API returns no rows for demograp

Question

When querying the YouTube Analytics API for demographics for a channel for a 1 day range (metric:viewerPercentage, dimensions:ageGroup,gender) in some cases no rows are returned. The api IS returning views for that day however.

2 reasons for this come to mind: 1. The data is not available yet because it is still being processed. 2. There is no known demographics for that (i.e. the gender and age of the user are not known)?

Am I safe to assume it's not (1) in this case because a query for views did return results? If I can't assume on then is it true that there's no difference in the response/results between "not processed" and "processed but all users are of unknown demographics?"

In other words if, when (2) were the case, the API would return a row with all zero's 0 for each demographic, that would enable us to interpret things correctly (but I'm pretty sure that's not how API queries with a dimension work).

Thanks for any guidance!

Answer 1

I can't provide any hard-and-fast guidance about the YouTube Analytics data processing pipeline, i.e. whether the demographic data will always be available at exactly the same time that the view count data is available in a report.

To get a more authoritative answer about this sort of specific question, I'd recommend going to the YouTube Analytics web interface (http://youtube.com/analytics) and try running an identical report from there. The web interface normally gives you some warning if you're requesting a report that relies on data that isn't yet available.