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My current side project is about to fail

So I guess a lot of people we know Lex Fridman's Podcast (https://www.youtube.com/@lexfridman). I thought of a small little webapp, which displays certain stats of the podcast over time. Like the views, likes, comment count, etc.

So I started developing a small POC. I figured it would be smart to start only with one data point. I settled on the view count. Fast forward and I got my backend running, pulling in each podcast at a rate of every 15 minutes and the view count of each podcast at a rate of every 5 minutes - great, so it seemed.

Time to visualize the data. I developed the frontend with the T3 Stack (https://create.t3.gg/) and Charts from Chart.js (https://www.chartjs.org/). Once I finished the first version I noticed sometimes... weird. The charts look wrong:

https://i.imgur.com/DXvALDA.png

It seems like I just display a static value on repeat - but nope, the first assumption is wrong. The data is correct. The problems lays with YouTube. YouTube does not update the data in the granularity thought of for this project. So in result, we can't track the view history in a very detailed way. What do you think? Where should I take this project from now?

on February 7, 2023