YouTube Viral Video Finder – Outlier Scores, Trends & Competitor Research

Find the YouTube videos that are exploding right now — and know why they exploded.

Most YouTube tools show you what is big. This one shows you what is overperforming. Every video is scored against the normal performance of the channel that published it, so a 200,000-view video on a 5,000-subscriber channel finally gets the attention it deserves — and a 200,000-view video on a channel that always does 2 million is correctly ignored.

That single number — the outlier score — is the difference between guessing what to make next and knowing.

🎯 Enter a topic. Get back every video in that niche that beat its own channel's baseline, ranked by how hard it beat it — with views, velocity, channel size, duration, tags, hook type and publishing day attached.

No YouTube account. No API key. No quotas. No login of any kind.

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⚡ Why creators, agencies and brands run this every week

Without it	With it
You scroll YouTube for hours looking for ideas	You get a ranked list of proven winners in 30 seconds
You copy what big channels do — and it flops	You copy what worked beyond expectations, at your channel size
You spot a trend when it is already saturated	You spot it while a 4,000-sub channel is quietly doing 500K views
You guess titles, lengths and posting days	You see the exact patterns behind the winners in your niche
You pay $30–$100/month for a subscription tool	You pay only for the scans you actually run

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📊 What you get for every video

Each row in your dataset is a complete intelligence file:

Performance

• outlierScore — how many times the video beat its own channel's normal performance
• performanceTier — viral / breakout / overperformer / normal / underperformer
• views, channelBaselineViews, viewsPerDay, viewsPerSubscriber
• isSmallChannelBreakout — the strongest possible signal that the topic is hot, not the channel
• estimatedAdRevenueUsdLow / estimatedAdRevenueUsdHigh — modelled earning range

Video

• Title, direct URL, thumbnail, full description, category and creator tags
• Exact publish timestamp, publishing weekday, age in days
• Duration in seconds and formatted, plus format (Shorts vs long-form)

Channel context

• Channel name, @handle, ID, URL, subscriber count, size tier
• Upload cadence (uploads per week) and how many uploads were used as the reference point

Content patterns

• titleHookType — how-to, listicle, question, challenge, comparison, warning, reveal, story
• Title length, word count, numbers, brackets, emojis, capitalisation ratio

45 clean, consistently-typed fields per video. Ready for Sheets, Airtable, Notion, a BI tool or your own model.

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👥 Who this is for

• YouTube creators — never open a blank content calendar again
• Faceless / automation channel operators — find formats that are working this week at your channel size
• Agencies & video editors — build content strategies for clients backed by evidence, not opinion
• Brands & social teams — see which creators and formats own your category
• Influencer marketing teams — find creators whose reach is accelerating before their rates go up
• Media & newsrooms — catch stories going viral on YouTube before they hit anywhere else
• Product & market researchers — measure real audience demand for a topic, week over week
• VCs and analysts — track attention shifts in consumer categories

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💡 Use cases

1. Content ideation that actually converts Scan your niche for the last 30 days with the Breakouts filter. You get a shortlist of formats that beat expectations — not a list of famous channels.

2. Weekly trend radar Schedule the Actor for every Monday with a 7-day window. Each run is a snapshot of what is accelerating. Compare runs to see topics rising and dying.

3. Competitor teardown Drop 10 competitor channels in, set the window to 12 months, and instantly see which of their videos overperformed — the ones they are quietly building their whole strategy around.

4. Title and thumbnail research Sort by outlier score, then read the titleHookType, titleLength and titleHasNumber columns. The packaging pattern behind the winners in your niche becomes obvious within one screen.

5. Shorts strategy Switch the format to Shorts only. Short-form is compared only against short-form, so you get an honest read on which Shorts overperformed.

6. Finding creators to sponsor Filter for isSmallChannelBreakout. These are channels with accelerating reach and rates that have not caught up yet.

7. Validating a new channel or niche Before committing months of production, measure how much demand actually exists and how big the winners are relative to channel size.

8. Best day and length to publish Aggregate publishedDayOfWeek and durationSeconds across the winners to see the cadence your niche rewards.

9. Keyword and tag mining The tags field shows the exact terms the winning videos target — a direct feed into your own YouTube SEO.

10. Client reporting Export to CSV or Excel and drop a ranked "what's working in your category" table into any deck.

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🚀 How to use it

1. Add your topics — one per line, exactly how a viewer would search (ai automation, sourdough bread, van build).
2. Optionally add channels — @handle or a channel URL, to analyse specific competitors.
3. Pick a time window, format and performance filter. Hit Start.

Everything else is tuned automatically. There is nothing technical to configure.

Input example

{
  "keywords": ["ai automation", "notion templates"],
  "channels": ["@veritasium"],
  "publishedWithin": "30d",
  "videoFormat": "all",
  "performanceFilter": "overperformers",
  "minViews": 1000,
  "region": "US",
  "maxResults": 200
}

Field	What it does
keywords	Topics or niches to scan
channels	Optional competitor channels (@handle or URL)
publishedWithin	24 hours → 12 months, or any time
videoFormat	All formats, long-form only, or Shorts only
performanceFilter	Everything, 2x, 5x or 10x the channel's normal views
minViews	Ignore videos below this view count
region	Audience market the scan should reflect
maxResults	How many scored videos to return

Output example

{
  "videoId": "hON6Fgjw5nc",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hON6Fgjw5nc",
  "title": "How I Fully Automated My Video Editing",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hON6Fgjw5nc/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "format": "long-form",
  "contentType": "video",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-30T14:02:11.000Z",
  "publishedDate": "2026-06-30",
  "publishedDayOfWeek": "Tuesday",
  "daysSincePublished": 27,
  "durationSeconds": 964,
  "durationFormatted": "16:04",
  "views": 84526,
  "outlierScore": 70.44,
  "performanceTier": "viral",
  "channelBaselineViews": 1200,
  "viewsPerDay": 3130,
  "viewsPerSubscriber": 6.71,
  "isSmallChannelBreakout": true,
  "estimatedAdRevenueUsdLow": 338.1,
  "estimatedAdRevenueUsdHigh": 1521.47,
  "channelName": "Creator Studio Lab",
  "channelHandle": "@creatorstudiolab",
  "channelId": "UCui4jxDaMb53Gdh-AZUTPAg",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCui4jxDaMb53Gdh-AZUTPAg",
  "channelSubscribers": 12600,
  "channelSizeTier": "small",
  "channelUploadsPerWeek": 1.4,
  "channelSampleSize": 28,
  "category": "Education",
  "tags": ["video editing", "ai automation", "content creation"],
  "tagCount": 18,
  "description": "In this video I break down the exact system...",
  "titleLength": 38,
  "titleWordCount": 6,
  "titleHookType": "story",
  "titleHasNumber": false,
  "titleHasQuestion": false,
  "titleIsListicle": false,
  "titleHasBrackets": false,
  "titleEmojiCount": 0,
  "titleUppercaseRatio": 0.08,
  "matchedQuery": "ai automation",
  "region": "US",
  "scannedAt": "2026-07-27T21:15:04.000Z"
}

Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or RSS, or pull it straight from the API.

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🔗 Integrations & automation

This Actor is built to sit inside a workflow, not just a browser tab.

• n8n — schedule a weekly scan, filter for outlierScore > 10, and push new ideas into Notion or Airtable automatically.
• Make (Integromat) — turn every breakout video into a card in Trello or a row in Google Sheets, then notify your editor in Slack.
• Zapier — send a Slack or email digest of the week's top outliers in your niche to the whole content team.
• Google Sheets / Looker Studio — keep a living dashboard of what is working in your category.
• Slack & Discord — post a daily "trending in our niche" alert to your creator community.
• API & webhooks — call it from your own app and receive results as soon as a run finishes.
• AI agents & MCP — feed the dataset to an LLM to auto-draft titles, hooks and scripts modelled on proven winners.

Pair it with a schedule and you have a permanent early-warning system for your niche.

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❓ FAQ

Do I need a YouTube account, API key or cookies? No. Nothing to connect, nothing to log in to, no quotas to manage.

What exactly is the outlier score? It is the video's views divided by what that channel normally gets for that format. An outlier score of 8 means the video did eight times better than that channel's usual video. It is the fastest way to separate a genuinely great idea from a channel that is simply large.

Why does the score stop at 500? Because beyond that the number stops being useful. A video that beat its channel 500 times over is already the strongest signal the dataset can give — the tier column simply calls it viral.

Why is that better than sorting by views? Sorting by views just shows you the biggest channels. Outlier scores show you which ideas worked — including on small channels, which is exactly where new formats appear first.

Does it work for Shorts? Yes. Set the format to Shorts only and short-form videos are compared only against other short-form videos, so the numbers stay honest.

Does it work outside English? Yes. Choose your market in the region selector and enter your topics in any language.

How fresh is the data? Every run is live at the moment you press Start. Nothing is served from a cache.

How many videos can I get? Up to 5,000 scored videos per run. Add more topics to widen the pool.

Can I track the same niche over time? Yes — schedule it daily or weekly. Each run is timestamped, so you can chart momentum.

Is the revenue estimate real earnings? No. It is a clearly-labelled modelled range based on typical category and market rates, useful for comparison between videos, not for accounting.

Can I use this for competitor monitoring? Yes. Add competitor channels instead of (or alongside) topics, and you get their entire overperformance history in one table.

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🧰 More tools from the same maker

• 📝 YouTube Transcript Turbo Saver — pull the full transcript of any winner you find here and reverse-engineer its script and structure.
• 🎬 TikTok Transcription AI — do the same across TikTok and see which hooks travel between platforms.
• 🔍 Google Search Autocomplete: Cheaper, Faster, Reliable — turn a winning video topic into hundreds of real search queries for titles and descriptions.
• 💬 Sentiment and Topics Text Classifier — classify titles, descriptions and comments at scale to map the emotional angles that convert.
• 📡 AI Media Monitor – Brand, News & Sentiment Tracker — watch how a trend spreads beyond YouTube into news and media.

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