We analyze 30,000–100,000 public comments across your entire catalog to surface the superfan intelligence, dormant audience insights, and content strategy signals that no dashboard or AI chatbot can see.
Most creators try ChatGPT or check their analytics dashboard. Neither can do what we do — and the reason is structural, not effort.
Copy-paste comments into AI
Video-level analytics dashboards
Commenter-level community intelligence
226K subscribers, 85 videos, 29,591 comments from 16,913 unique commenters. Real outputs, not mockups. Every statistic traces to source data.
COMMUNITY OVERVIEW
Total unique commenters: 16,913
Engagement tiers:
Core fans (5+ videos): 247 (1.5%) ← These produce 34% of all comments
Regular viewers (2–4): 2,108 (12.5%)
One-time commenters: 14,558 (86.1%)
TOP SUPERFANS (by composite engagement score)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
#1 [Commenter A] Score: 94.2
Videos engaged: 47/85 | Comments: 156 | Likes received: 2,847
First seen: 2022-03-14 | Tenure: 34 months | Active last 7 days: Yes
Pattern: Responds to nearly every upload within 4 hours. Defends creator
in threads. Answers other viewers' questions unprompted.
#2 [Commenter B] Score: 87.6
Videos engaged: 39/85 | Comments: 98 | Likes received: 1,203
First seen: 2022-08-01 | Tenure: 29 months | Active last 7 days: Yes
Pattern: Deep engagement on lore-heavy content. Writes paragraph-length
analysis. Frequently cited by other commenters.
DORMANT ADVOCATES (formerly active, silent 60+ days)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
30 previously engaged fans have gone quiet.
12 were core fans (5+ videos engaged before going silent).
Notable: [Commenter M] — engaged with 22 videos, 67 comments, last seen
commenting on a video about editorial changes. Final comment sentiment:
negative (expressed frustration with shorter format).
CONTENT LONGEVITY ANALYSIS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Evergreen (growing 30+ days after publish): 23 videos (27%) Steady performers (stable views): 31 videos (36%) Flash (90%+ views in first 7 days): 31 videos (36%) Top evergreen performer: "[Video Title]" — still accumulating 400+ views/day 18 months after publication. Accounts for 12% of total channel views. CONTENT OPPORTUNITY SIGNALS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ OPPORTUNITY #1: [Series] Continuation Signal Strength: STRONG (14 existing episodes, 47 explicit requests) Evidence: "For Gwyn's sake. I've been waiting for DS 3 video for Ten THOUSAND YEARS!" "@creator can't wait to see what you do for [topic]!" Recommendation: Prioritize within 30 days. High confidence. OPPORTUNITY #2: Behind-the-scenes / Process Content Signal Strength: MODERATE (23 comments across 8 videos) Evidence: Viewers frequently ask about research process and editing. Recommendation: Test with one video. Lower production cost, high engagement.
ENGAGEMENT TRAJECTORY (Last 12 Months) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Comments/video: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▆▆▅▅ Declining (-18%) Unique commenters: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ Stable Core fan activity: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▆▅▅▅▄▃ Declining (-31%) New viewer ratio: ▃▃▄▄▅▅▆▆▇▇▇▇ Growing (+42%) INTERPRETATION: Channel is acquiring new viewers (good) but losing depth of engagement from existing community (concerning). Core fan decline of 31% suggests recent content is attracting breadth at the expense of depth. CRITICAL SIGNAL: 12 of your top 30 superfans reduced engagement in the past 90 days. Common pattern: last engaged with [content type], disengaged after shift to [different content type]. This is recoverable — but requires attention. DORMANT RECOVERY TARGETS: We identified 8 high-value dormant fans whose engagement patterns suggest they would re-engage with specific content types. Detailed recommendations in full report.
The structural difference: Other tools work at the video level — views, clicks, tags. We work at the individual audience member level across your entire catalog. That's what makes superfan mapping, dormant detection, and evidence-based content strategy possible.
Every section is built from your actual comment data with statistics, direct quotes, and specific recommendations — all verified against source.
Your top community members ranked by composite engagement score — who they are, when they showed up, and what content keeps them engaged.
Fans who used to be active but went quiet — and crucially, what their final interactions reveal about why.
What your audience is explicitly and implicitly asking for — mapped to content opportunities with confidence scoring.
Engagement trajectory, community health indicators, and early warning signals — the structural health of your audience over time.
Individual-level tracking. We don't aggregate — we track each commenter across every video they've engaged with, building behavioral profiles over their entire history with your channel.
Verified intelligence. Every statistic is computed from complete data and every AI-generated insight is checked against source comments. No hallucinated numbers, no black-box summaries.
Actionable specificity. Not "your audience likes gaming content." Instead: "47 viewers explicitly requested a DS3 video, your #1 superfan's engagement dropped after you shifted formats, and 12 dormant fans correlate with shorter video length."
A focused look at your community structure — engagement tiers, top superfans, and one key content signal. See what's in your data before committing to a full report. Credit applies toward any upgrade.
Complete community intelligence report across your entire catalog. Everything you need to make smarter content decisions.
For established creators who want the complete picture — extended history, competitor crossover, and long-term content strategy architecture.
The one-time report is a snapshot. The partnership is a time-lapse. Track how your community evolves over time.
If the analysis doesn't surface at least 3 actionable insights you didn't already know, we refund you in full. We can offer this because our analysis consistently surfaces 10+ insights per channel. The guarantee exists because we know the quality is there.
Just your public URL. No login, no API keys, no credentials. We handle the rest.
We pull 90 days of public comments via YouTube's API, run the full pipeline, and verify every finding. Typically 30K–100K comments.
You receive a 30–50 page report with verified statistics, direct quotes, and specific recommendations. Turnaround: 4–7 days.
We walk through findings together, help you prioritize, and check in at Day 14 and Day 30 to make sure you're implementing.
This distinction matters to us. Headwater is built to understand how communities function — not to build profiles on individuals or enable monitoring. That's a principled design choice, not just a legal disclaimer.
Data retention: Analysis data is retained for 90 days after delivery to support follow-up questions and check-ins, then deleted. For monthly partnerships, data is retained for the duration. You can request deletion at any time.
This works best for creators with established audiences and consistent engagement. If you're just starting out, focus on growth fundamentals first.
Not sure? Email us your channel URL and we'll give you an honest assessment within 24 hours — no sales pressure.
ChatGPT can handle about 2,000–3,000 comments in a single session. We process 30,000–100,000. More importantly, ChatGPT can't track individual commenters across videos (that requires a database), can't compute verified engagement metrics from complete data, and has no verification layer to prevent hallucination. We compute everything quantitatively first, then use AI only for pattern recognition — and verify every AI output back to source data.
We only analyze public comments — the same data any viewer can see. We never ask for your login, API keys, YouTube Studio access, or any credentials. All we need is your public channel URL. Importantly, community members in our reports are represented as pseudonyms and anonymous hashes, not real display names — the intelligence value is in behavioral patterns, not in cataloguing individuals.
We classify every video by how its views accumulate over time. "Evergreen" videos keep finding new viewers months later. "Flash" videos spike and die within a week. Knowing which formats have lasting reach changes how you allocate your time. A single evergreen video can be worth 4–8 flash videos in long-term view accumulation.
If you're getting 100+ comments per video on average, there's enough signal. Smaller niches often have more valuable comment data because engagement tends to be higher quality.
If the analysis doesn't surface at least 3 actionable insights you didn't already know, we refund you in full. We can offer this because our analysis consistently surfaces 10+ insights per channel.
The one-time report is a snapshot. The partnership is a time-lapse. We take recurring snapshots of your community, tracking how individual commenters migrate between tiers, which videos drive that journey, when superfans go dormant, and when dormant fans re-engage. Over time this builds a longitudinal intelligence asset that no one-time analysis can match.
We show real output excerpts above across three report sections. If you're seriously considering this, email us and we can arrange a screenshare of a complete anonymized report — or we'll send you a free channel health snapshot so you can see the methodology in action on your own data.
We'll show you what they're saying — with the quotes to prove it.
Get Started →