Hi all,
Just here to give to advise to any aspiring web developers in the community that are interested in setting up a YouTube TIP app.
What you want to do is create a
UserScript.
This is a piece of code that runs in the users browser and gets injected into certain websites.
Userscripts are installed through the Chrome Web Store on Chrome and through extensions like Greasemonkey.
This means of course that users have to install the app to be able to use it, but that's the closest you'll get without breaking into a Google Datacenter and changing the YT source code
.
Once you have the basis of a userscript you can use the
TIP jar JS snippet that will be available in the next version of our API.
This is basically just a button that says 'TIP' and a balloon with the number of received TIPS.
To connect the TIP jar to the user, I'd suggest using the channel name, since this is unique on YT.
Your biggest hurdle is actually making the YouTuber aware that he/she has gotten TIPped.
Our advice is to look into the G+ API for this, see if you can leave a channel comment.
Another route completely would be to make YouTubers opt in in this system.
This means their video descriptions need to include some text like
which you could scan for.
Only when you find this text you show the TIP jar button.
Then you'd give the YouTuber in question a link where he/she can see stats, get the TIPS, etc.
Good luck!