Hunter now finds YouTube and Reddit partners

Hunter, RelayWonder's partner discovery tool, now searches YouTube and Reddit alongside the web, so you can find YouTube and Reddit partners who already talk about your category. On YouTube it uses the official YouTube Data API: for each query it finds recent videos, then reads each channel's subscriber count, its most recent matching video, any public email the creator typed into the channel description, and its country. On Reddit it finds the communities where your topic is discussed and the named people posting in them, through Reddit's official API when Reddit app keys are configured, or otherwise through a web search limited to reddit.com; that fallback has no upvote or member counts. Quota matters: as of October 2026, Google's docs list a default of 100 search.list calls a day in their own bucket, and 10,000 units a day for other calls [1][5]. This post explains what each source returns, the quota arithmetic, the audience check, and how to turn a Reddit thread into a partnership.

What Hunter does, in one paragraph

You describe who you are looking for: keywords, competitors, platforms, countries, a minimum audience size, and whether you only want people with a public email. Hunter expands that into a small number of search queries, at most eight per search, such as "best invoicing software", "invoicing software review" or "CompetitorName alternative". It runs them against the sources you asked for that are available, removes duplicates, finds public contact emails on blogs and newsletters, filters by your criteria, and saves the results as a prospect list. YouTube channels then get an audience quality check, and prospects with an email get an AI score of A, B or C with a reason and a suggested opening hook, within a weekly cap. From there you can send outreach from your own mailbox.

How Hunter searches YouTube

For each query, Hunter calls the YouTube Data API's search.list method for videos, asking for up to 25 results in English. The method accepts up to 50 results per page, defaults to 5, and supports filters such as type, order, publishedAfter, relevanceLanguage and regionCode [2]. Searching videos rather than channels matters: a channel whose name has nothing to do with invoicing can still have published "the best invoicing tools for freelancers" last month, and that video is the reason to contact them.

Hunter then reads the channels behind those videos in one channels.list call. From the channel resource it takes the title, the custom URL, the description, the country and the statistics. The description matters because many creators write a business email there; Hunter extracts a plausible contact address and ignores obvious non-contacts. The API documents the channel description as up to 1,000 characters [3]. Hunter does not guess emails and does not look them up anywhere else: if the creator did not publish one, the prospect has no email.

Two limits of the public data are worth knowing. Subscriber counts above 1,000 are rounded down to three significant figures, so 123,456 is returned as 123,000, a change Google made in September 2019 [3][4]. And a channel can hide its subscriber count, which the API reports with the hiddenSubscriberCount field [3]. Hunter keeps a hidden count as unknown rather than zero, so a minimum-subscriber filter does not drop the channel; the audience check flags it instead.

The YouTube audience quality check

A subscriber count alone says little about whether anyone watches. For each YouTube prospect, Hunter reads the channel's statistics and its 15 most recent uploads, with views, likes, comments and publish dates, and computes four numbers: average views per video, views per subscriber, engagement rate as likes plus comments divided by views, and days since the last upload. It then applies a few plain rules and gives the channel a level of good, watch or risk.

A worked example. Channel A has 48,000 subscribers. Its last 15 videos have 186,000 views in total, so average views are 186,000 ÷ 15 = 12,400, and views per subscriber are 12,400 ÷ 48,000 = 0.258, about 26%. Those videos have 7,440 likes and comments combined, so engagement is 7,440 ÷ 186,000 = 4.0%. The last upload was 6 days ago. No flags: good. Channel B has 210,000 subscribers but averages 1,500 views, so views per subscriber are 1,500 ÷ 210,000 = 0.007, under the 1% line: risk. Channel B is not necessarily fake; it may have grown on one viral video years ago. But it will not deliver an audience proportional to its subscriber count, and you should not pay as if it will.

The check uses only public data. It does not estimate a "fake follower percentage", because that cannot be computed from what the API returns, and it does not run on Instagram or TikTok, which have no comparable public data source for this. The result is stored with the prospect and is one of the inputs to the AI score.

How much YouTube API quota does a search use?

The YouTube Data API charges a cost per request. Google's getting-started guide says projects have a default allocation of 10,000 units a day for most endpoints, plus separate defaults of 100 search.list calls and 100 videos.insert calls [5]. The quota cost page lists channels.list, videos.list and playlistItems.list at 1 unit each, and search.list at 1 unit charged to its own Search Queries bucket of 100 calls a day [1]. This is newer than many tutorials: the revision history records that on June 1, 2026 the API began moving to a granular quota system, starting with videos.insert and search.list [4]. Older guides that say "a search costs 100 units" describe the previous system.

The binding limit is the search bucket, not the unit pool. At 8 search calls per Hunter search, 100 calls a day allow 100 ÷ 8 = 12.5, so 12 full searches a day, using 12 × 98 = 1,176 general units, about 12% of the 10,000. Google lets a project view its limits in the Cloud Console and request more through its quota extension process [4]. These limits apply per API project, which is why Hunter keeps queries few and precise, at most eight per search, rather than firing dozens of variations.

How Hunter searches Reddit

Reddit is where buyers ask each other "what do you use for X?" and where the most useful answers come from people with no audience to speak of, just experience. Hunter treats Reddit as two kinds of prospect: communities (subreddits) where your topic comes up, and named people who post or answer in those threads.

With Reddit API keys

When a Reddit app's client ID and secret are configured, Hunter uses Reddit's official API with an application token. For each query it searches posts from the past year, sorted by relevance, 25 at a time. For each post it records the author as a prospect, with the thread title, the community and the number of upvotes, and it records the community itself with its member count when Reddit returns one. Deleted authors are skipped.

Without keys: the web search fallback

When Reddit keys are not configured, Hunter still searches Reddit, through the same web search it uses for blogs, limited to reddit.com. From each result it takes the community from the thread's URL and any named poster (u/name) that appears in the title or snippet, along with the thread title and link. Be clear about what this does not give you: there are no upvote counts and no member counts, because a web search result does not contain them. Hunter leaves those fields empty rather than estimating them. You still get the communities and the named people, which is usually what you need to start reading.

How to turn a Reddit thread into a partnership

Reddit prospects need a different approach from YouTube creators. Most have no public email, and many communities dislike promotion. The goal is not to recruit the thread; it is to find the one or two people who answer these questions well and see whether a partnership makes sense to them.

1. Read the whole thread first. Note who gave the specific, experienced answer, not who posted the question.
2. Open that person's profile and recent history. Do they answer questions in your category regularly? Do they link a blog, a newsletter or a YouTube channel? A linked site is often where a business email lives.
3. Read the community's rules on self-promotion and affiliate links. Some ban them entirely; respect that in anything you propose.
4. If you reply in the thread, say who you are ("I work on Ledgerly") and add something useful. Do not ask the community to sign up for anything.
5. Contact the person through their linked site, or through Reddit's own messaging if that is the only route. Be specific: which answer of theirs you read and why it made you write.
6. Offer the program plainly: the commission terms, the coupon, and a personal invite link. If they prefer one-off work, offer a content campaign with a Reddit deliverable and a stated bounty.
7. Agree the disclosure. FTC guidance says to disclose a material connection where the recommendation is made [6]; on Reddit that means in the comment or post itself.

Outreach emails from Hunter are sent from your own connected mailbox, with scheduled follow-ups that stop when the person replies. Each email carries a signed personal invite link valid for 90 days that applies them to your program when they sign up, so a Reddit regular who writes back a week later does not have to find your program page.

Which sources run, and how to tell

• YouTube runs when a YouTube Data API key is configured. Without one, Hunter skips YouTube and the search summary says the source is not connected.
• Reddit uses the official API when a Reddit app client ID and secret are configured. Without them, Reddit searches use the web search fallback.
• Web search uses Serper or Perplexity Search. It powers blog and newsletter results and the Reddit fallback.
• Choose platforms per search. If you only want YouTube creators, untick Reddit and the web, and you will spend only YouTube quota.
• Each search summary lists, per source, how many prospects it found and any error, so a missing key or exhausted quota shows up plainly.

A first search to try this week

Pick one competitor and two keywords. With competitor "CompetitorName" and keywords "invoicing software" and "freelance invoicing", Hunter generates up to seven queries: the competitor's review, alternative and affiliate queries, and a "best" and "review" query for each keyword. Tick YouTube and Reddit, set a minimum of 1,000 subscribers for YouTube, and leave "email only" off so Reddit prospects are kept. When the list is done, sort YouTube prospects by audience level and Reddit prospects by community, read the top five threads, and write three personal emails. That is a realistic first week.