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How to See Another YouTube Channel's Stats (2026)

The fastest way to see another YouTube channel's stats is its public About tab: subscriber count, join/creation date, total views, and per-video view counts, all visible without an account. Third-party trackers like Social Blade layer on history and growth trends. Estimated revenue is the one number nobody outside the channel actually has.

What you can see on another channel straight from YouTube#

Open any channel's homepage and click About to get four numbers for free: public subscriber count, join date, lifetime view count, and (one level down, on each upload) the view count for that video, Short, or community post. No login, no extension, no account of your own required.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Most people check one video and assume it represents the channel — it doesn't. Long-form uploads, Shorts, and community posts each pull from different distribution pools, so the view counts aren't comparable to each other. If you're sizing up a channel, scroll its Videos tab and Shorts shelf separately; mixing the two skews your read on how the content is actually performing.

On desktop, the About panel sits under the channel banner, next to Videos and Playlists. On mobile, tap the channel name, then the three-dot or "About" line near the subscriber count. Same data, one extra tap.

One thing that's changed: YouTube used to let creators hide their subscriber count from public view. That option was removed around July 2022, largely as an anti-impersonation move, so the number you see today next to any channel name is the real one, not an old cached figure or a creator's choice to hide it. YouTube's own Help documentation on channel basics covers the full rundown of what's on a channel's public page.

A quick comparison: which method fits which job#

Every method past the About tab exists to answer a question the About tab can't. Here's how they stack up:

Read it top to bottom and the pattern is obvious: every row above the last one answers a question about one channel, one look at a time. For a fuller tool-by-tool breakdown of what each one shows and where its free tier stops, see 9 free YouTube competitor analysis tools.

Seeing a channel's growth trend over time#

A subscriber count is a snapshot — it tells you where a channel stands today, not whether it's climbing or stalling. A channel at 500,000 subs after three years and one at 8,000 after six months can look "smaller" or "bigger" than each other depending on which number you glance at, but only a trend line tells you which one is actually moving.

Social Blade is the standard tool for this, and honestly the only one worth bookmarking for trend-watching. Search or paste a channel's URL and you get a day-by-day history of subscriber and view counts, a letter grade, and a rough near-term growth projection built from that trend.

The honest limit: the free tier only keeps about 14 days of history, and there's no CSV or Excel export. The longer arc (six months, a year) sits behind Social Blade's Personal Premium tier, which starts around $3.99/month. For a quick "hot or cold" read, the free 14 days is usually enough; for a real trend line, you're paying for it.

How to find when a channel was created (channel age)#

Another channel's real creation date is the "Joined [date]" line on its About tab. That's it. There's no hidden field, no deeper setting, no separate "founded" date somewhere else. Whatever date sits next to "Joined" on that channel's About page is the day the channel itself came into existence.

This is worth being precise about, because it's easy to conflate with two other things. It is not the date you subscribed — that's a fact about your account, not theirs, and it lives in your own subscription history. And it's not buried in your Google or YouTube watch/activity history either; that history only tracks what you did, never when someone else's channel was created. The join date is public, sitting in plain sight on their About tab, regardless of when you personally discovered them.

Dedicated "channel age checker" tools exist, and they work, but most of them do one thing: look up the same About-tab join date and hand it back to you, sometimes with a running "X years, Y days" counter. Useful in a pinch, thin beyond that single screen; honestly, I've never found one that tells you anything the About tab didn't already.

Age changes how you should read everything else on the channel. A brand-new channel still pulling strong per-video views relative to its subscriber count usually means the algorithm is actively testing and pushing it. The view-to-sub ratio by channel age framing lays out exactly what "strong" looks like at different ages. Among the channels we've fully scored, roughly 4 in 10 were created in just the last 12 months. That's not a rare-exception footnote: young channels are a huge share of what's actively competing right now, and age alone isn't a verdict on whether a niche is worth entering.

Screening more than a couple of channels by creation date gets old fast by hand. Viddar's Niche Hunter has a channel-age filter built on that same join-date field, so you can screen thousands of channels at once instead of opening About tabs one at a time.

Estimating another channel's revenue (and why the number lies)#

Social Blade and NoxInfluencer both show an "estimated earnings" range on channels they track: a monthly low-to-high spread meant to represent possible ad revenue.

Treat that range as a guess, because it is one. Every tool assumes a CPM (cost per thousand ad impressions) and applies it to estimated views, and different tools assume different CPMs — that's why two "estimated earnings" figures for the same channel rarely match. None of them can see the channel's actual AdSense account. What a channel actually earns per 1,000 views is its RPM, driven far more by audience geography and ad fill rate than by the niche label. See YouTube RPM by niche for the real mechanics.

There's also a question that comes before revenue: has the channel even turned monetization on? A channel with no ads and no Join button hasn't cleared YouTube's bar yet, and no revenue estimate means anything until it has. How to check if a YouTube channel is monetized covers the public signals for that. The actual eligibility bar sits on YouTube's Partner Program eligibility page: 1,000 subscribers plus 4,000 public watch hours in 12 months, or 10 million Shorts views in 90 days.

Checking many channels' stats at once instead of one by one#

Every method above shares the same ceiling: one channel, one look. That's fine for a single competitor. It falls apart the moment you're vetting a shortlist of twenty channels or scanning an entire niche for who's actually growing.

Viddar runs the same public-signal reads covered in this post automatically, across a tracked dataset of over 19 million channels: About-tab stats, VSR, growth velocity, channel age, monetization signal. Instead of opening twenty About tabs and cross-referencing them in a spreadsheet, set a filter, something like "channels under 6 months old with VSR above 5," and get a ranked list back in seconds. Start your free trial and run that filter against the whole dataset instead of one channel at a time.

FAQ#

Is there a 100% free way to see another channel's stats? Yes. YouTube's own About tab shows subscriber count, join date, total views, and per-video views for free, with no account needed. Third-party tools only add extras like history and trend lines on top of that same free baseline.

How can I tell when a YouTube channel was created? Check the "Joined [date]" line on its About tab. That's the channel's actual creation date. It's not the date you subscribed, and it's not something you'd find in your own Google or YouTube activity history.

Are the revenue estimates for someone else's channel accurate? No. They're CPM-based guesses, and different tools assume different CPMs, which is why estimates for the same channel disagree from tool to tool. Only the channel owner sees real AdSense numbers.

Can I check stats for many channels at once? Not with the single-channel tools covered above: Social Blade, NoxInfluencer, and manual About-tab checks all work one channel at a time. A database tool built for bulk filtering can screen the whole set in one pass.

If you only open one thing before judging a channel, open its About tab — subs, join date, and views are already sitting there for free. Everything past that is you deciding which specific question, a trend, an age, a revenue guess, is worth pulling in a tool for.