How NollyIndex calculates its weekly Nollywood YouTube rankings — and what it deliberately does not do.
A scheduled job attempts to collect one public-statistics snapshot for every tracked channel each day via the official YouTube Data API. Rankings are calculated automatically from the successfully stored snapshots — there is no editorial curation or manual placement within the ranking. No channel is ranked higher because of a relationship, a payment, or a request.
7-day view velocity is the ranking signal: the latest stored view count minus the view count from the most recent available snapshot dated at least six days earlier. Channels with that comparison history are sorted from the largest view gain to the smallest.
Channels without a comparison snapshot are labeled NEW, placed after every channel with established history, and ordered by their current lifetime view count. Upload counts, subscribers, and other scale metrics are shown as context but do not change rank.
A channel needs an available comparison snapshot dated at least six days before the latest snapshot before a meaningful velocity comparison exists. Until then, it is labeled NEW rather than being assigned a fabricated ▲ or ▼. If you see "Building baseline" as the Data Status, it means none of the currently ranked channels has comparison history yet.
Each tracked channel has separate genre, language, and format fields stored in D1. The current values were populated through a reviewed channel-by-channel classification pass matched by channel ID. These are persisted classification records, not values inferred from current performance when a page is rendered.
The legacy free-text category remains stored separately for compatibility and provenance.
Language disclosure: language defaults to English unless the stored category explicitly provides evidence otherwise. At present, Yorubahood is the only channel marked Yoruba. English is therefore an assumed default for the other channels, not independently verified per-channel language data.
Subscriber counts, view counts, and video counts come directly from the YouTube Data API v3, Google's official public API. Those metrics are not scraped or estimated. A scheduled job runs automatically once daily and stores each successfully retrieved channel's numbers as a historical snapshot, which makes velocity calculations possible.
Collection limitation: if a YouTube API batch fails for some channels on a given day, those channels receive no snapshot for that date and are omitted from rankings based on the latest snapshot until a later collection succeeds. The current public interface does not surface that batch error.