Coat of Arm Wars

The problem

A media kit is a document a stranger uses to decide whether to send money, so the numbers on it have to be checkable. The trouble is that they move daily. Hand-typed figures carry a read date that ages badly, and a sponsor who spots one stale number starts wondering what else on the page is out of date.

What got built

A build-time script reads the subscriber count, lifetime views and video count off the channel and counts the shorts tab, then rewrites the site's own content file with the date attached. It runs on every deploy, so the kit is never older than the last push. It also refuses to publish a number it cannot stand behind: views and video counts only ever climb, so a figure that has gone backwards is treated as a bad read and the last known good one ships instead. The shorts, videos and live tabs are reconciled against the total the channel itself reports before anything is written.

Details worth naming

• Audience figures rewrite themselves on every deploy, with the read date moving with them and a guard that refuses any number it cannot stand behind.
• Media kit built entirely on evidence: every claim links to the public video it came from.
• Search across shows, videos, rules, glossary terms, guests, placements and partners, indexed at build time so there is no service to run.
• A share card generated for every route, including each show, rather than one card for the home page.
• Analytics split by what it costs the visitor: cookieless traffic counting for everyone, and the client's own GA4 tag behind a consent notice that loads denied and can be withdrawn from the footer.