Connect your YouTube

Bring your channel into byline: not just the titles, but what you actually said on camera, the comments underneath each video, and how every upload performed over time.

What comes in

When you connect a channel, byline reads your uploads and folds them into your brand memory:

• Your videos. Every upload it can find, with the title, description and link.
• The transcript. byline reads the words you actually spoke, so your on-camera voice counts as much as anything you type. A talk and a newsletter feed the same profile.
• The comments. What your audience says under each video, kept as audience signal (more on that below).
• The numbers, over time. Views, likes and comment counts, snapshotted on a schedule so byline can tell which videos are climbing.

Once it's in, all of this reaches the AI tools you write in through your byline connection link:

https://byline.fyi/api/mcp

Connect your channel

1. Open Sources in your dashboard and find the YouTube card.
2. Paste your channel's address or handle, for example https://youtube.com/@yourchannel.
3. Add it. byline finds your uploads from there and starts reading.

There's nothing to sign into. byline only reads what your channel already shows the public, so connecting is really just telling it where to look.

Comments and performance over time

byline doesn't grab a video once and forget it. It keeps pulling new comments as they land and re-checks the view, like and comment counts on a cadence: densely while a video is fresh, more sparsely as it settles. That running history is what powers your insights, like which upload over-performed your own baseline, what your audience keeps asking you to make, or an older video worth resurfacing alongside a new one.

Comments stay in their own lane. They teach byline about your audience, but they never get mixed into how you sound. Your voice profile is built only from your own work.

Videos with comments turned off

Plenty of creators switch comments off on some or all of their videos, and that's completely fine. byline still brings in the video and its full transcript. It simply has nothing to read in the comments for that one. Comments off is treated as "nothing to collect here," never as an error, so it never holds up the rest of your channel.

How it stays fresh

After the first read, byline keeps up on its own:

• New uploads are picked up and ingested automatically. No re-importing.
• Comments and view counts refresh on a schedule, more often for recent videos.

If you'd rather not wait, each connected channel has a Resync button that runs a fresh read on demand. It's lightly rate-limited, so give it a few minutes between presses.

Honest limits

A few things worth being straight about:

• Public only. byline reads what your channel shows publicly. Private and unlisted videos aren't included.
• Big comment sections get sampled. On a video with thousands of comments, byline reads a representative chunk rather than every last reply, so one viral post doesn't drown out everything else.
• Counts, not deep analytics. byline tracks views, likes and comment counts over time. Richer YouTube analytics like watch time, retention and audience demographics aren't part of this yet.