I'm attempting to brew a YouTube Analytics client for personal use to prevent me from having to log everything manually. I'll probably end up writing it in C#, but that isn't necessarily important.
The thing that I notice is the Analytics page on YouTube rounds down the estimatedMinutesWatched parameter to only one element of precision (i.e. if over 1 hour, you lose seconds-level precision). My question is if there is any way of retrieving the exact amount of time (hh::mm::ss, etc.) from the Analytics API.
Well, I just rather figured out a way to my own question, and I'm posting this just in case there are any other statistic nuts like me that are scratching their heads in the same way.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to use a combination query composed of
views, averageViewDurationand then parsing this to taste. This will give a total view time, accurate to the second that will avoid theestimatedMinutesWatchedprecision-rounding.