What Peerfield is
Peerfield is a YouTube competitor research platform for creators, brands and agencies. From one YouTube channel it finds the creators and brands competing for the same audience and researches, from public sources, what they sell, where they advertise and which of their videos cover the same topics.
It answers questions about the field around a channel: who competes for its audience, what those creators and brands sell, where they advertise, and which of their videos cover the same topics. It does not measure a channel’s own statistics.
Sources
Everything Peerfield shows comes from sources anyone can open.
- Public YouTube data
- Channel profiles and their public counts (subscribers, videos), video titles, descriptions and topics, and the language and country a channel states.
- Public ad libraries
- The Google / YouTube ad library: whether a peer advertises, since when, how many creatives, and individual ads with their headline, text and destination. The LinkedIn ad library: whether a peer advertises there and how many ads, without the ad texts.
- Websites and public offers
- A peer’s own website and linked profiles, the pages its ads and links lead to (address, page type, title, and the headline and call to action where the page shows them), and the courses, memberships, products and services it offers there, with prices where they are shown publicly.
- Nothing private
- No YouTube login, no access to YouTube Analytics, no data about individual viewers. Sign-in to Peerfield is by e-mail link.
The research stages
After you confirm the channel, five stages run in the background. You do not need to keep the page open: we email a secure link when the result is ready.
Channel identified
We resolve the URL or handle you pasted to one YouTube channel and read its public profile: title, description, language, country, size and recent uploads.
Content landscape analyzed
We map what the channel is about — topics, formats, the questions it answers and the search intent it serves — so peers are found by what the audience wants, not by keywords alone.
Potential peers discovered
We look for creators and brands that reach the same kind of audience: similar topics, overlapping search results, comparable products and offers, the same language and region.
Commercial peers classified
For each candidate we classify how they make money and whether they advertise — own products, courses, sponsorships, subscriptions, ads on YouTube/Google and LinkedIn — using public ad libraries and landing pages. Meta and Instagram ads are not part of the research.
Results verified
Your five strongest peers are ranked automatically and sent as soon as the research is done. Before a complete map is released, a researcher reviews the ranked list, removes false matches and confirms the reasons.
Peer relevance
Peer relevance is how closely a channel or brand competes with yours, modeled from topics, formats, positioning and commercial signals. It is a model score, not a measurement.
It is shown as a percentage relative to your strongest peer, which sets the top of the scale. It ranks the field around one channel; it does not grade quality or success, and two maps are not compared on it.
It is not a measurement of shared viewers. Which viewers two channels share is not public, and Peerfield does not ask for it.
Four types of peer
Not every competitor is a look-alike. Each peer is tagged with the way it competes with you, and a peer can carry more than one type.
- Direct Peer
- Covers the same topics for the same kind of audience at a comparable scale.In plain words: A direct competitor: same topics, same kind of audience, comparable scale.
- Adjacent Peer
- Serves an overlapping audience from a neighboring topic or format.In plain words: A competitor from a neighboring topic or format.
- Aspirational Peer
- Same audience and topic, but at a materially larger scale.In plain words: A bigger channel on the same topics — the reference your audience compares you with.
- Commercial Peer
- A brand or business that markets to this audience rather than a creator.In plain words: A brand or business marketing to the same audience.
Three evidence classes
Every claim on a map — a reason, an offer, an ad state, a monetization signal — says how we know it.
- Observed
- Directly observed from a public source (a page, an ad, a listing) at the time shown. This is a verified fact, not a guess.
- Estimated
- Derived from observed data using a documented method (for example, a range inferred from public counts). Treat as an approximation.
- Inferred
- Concluded from indirect signals by our analysis. Plausible, but not directly verified — check the source before relying on it.
A reason built from several signals carries the weakest class among them: a claim is only as strong as its weakest part.
Who checks the result
The complete map is checked by a researcher before it is released. The researcher confirms that each peer really competes for the same audience, corrects peer types, removes false matches and checks that every reason is specific to the channel.
The free result is ranked automatically: its 5 strongest peers by peer relevance, each with its reason. It is not a researcher’s selection.
Where a public source gives us nothing, the map says Unknown or “not checked yet”, never “no”. Shares are always shown with their base, as “x of y checked”.
How current a map is
A map is researched at a point in time, and every signal shows when it was last observed. Ad checks on a fresh map can take a few days to fill; until then they read “not checked yet”.
Peerfield Monitor, an optional subscription per channel, keeps a map you bought current with a fresh research run every 14 days: new and dropped peers, rank moves, ads started or stopped, new offers, and the price changes Peerfield observed between its own refreshes.
Limits: what the research does not tell you
These limits are deliberate. A source we cannot open is not guessed at.
- No shared-viewer data. Peer relevance is modeled from public signals; it never measures which viewers two channels share.
- No YouTube Analytics. Peerfield never asks for your YouTube login or for access to any channel’s statistics.
- No Meta, Instagram or TikTok ads. Advertising comes from the Google / YouTube and LinkedIn ad libraries only.
- LinkedIn without ad texts. For LinkedIn we show whether a peer advertises and how many ads, not what the ads say.
- No sponsor rates or sponsorship history. There is no record of who sponsored whom or what was paid, and no e-mail addresses or media kits.
- Prices only where public. Many offers show no price at all; we never fill one in with an estimate.
- Landing pages: address, page type, title, and the headline and call to action where the page shows them. Prices come from the offers, where they are public.
- No revenue figures. Peerfield shows how a peer makes money, not how much.
- An upper bound, not a promise. A map holds up to 1,000 peers; a narrow niche has fewer, and the map shows only what the research found.
Questions