What is Metarch?
Metarch is a YouTube research, ideation, and production tracking system that helps creators, faceless channel owners, and YouTube strategists decide what to make next, and then measure what happened when they made it.
Metarch is best at the one thing that actually grows, or kills, a channel: deciding what idea to make next and what niches to enter. Not decided by AI scraping, but by using data as a tool for the one moat you have over every other channel: your brain.
Every tool you already pay for is good at one thing. One finds outliers, one holds your ideation strategy, one shows your analytics. None of them continue helping you make the best decisions based upon that idea once it is released. No other tool can be the only one you use to run your YouTube business.
What does Metarch do?
The Outlier Vault
A permanent, searchable, filterable vault of every scored outlier on Metarch, organised by niche, release date, views, and more. A video only enters it after passing the 11 Gates of Admission, a proprietary filter to only allow high quality and rare outliers for channels to be shown. No noise, only useful research.
The ZYRA Score
Metarch's own proprietary and mathematically researched outlier score, scaling from 0 to 100+. It asks whether a video was rare for its own channel, remarkable across YouTube, and big for that channel's real audience. It is shown alongside the average and subscriber outlier scores, so you can filter on whichever number you trust most… but we recommended assessing all three for a complete picture.
Channel Discovery and competitor research
Add and track any competitor channel, and any video, into your own channel’s workspace. Every channel you add becomes part of your notification system: you are told when a new upload becomes an outlier, and when an existing video starts gaining momentum again. Competitor tracking made easy.
Nichefinder and Master Keywords
Nichefinder is a tool for you that uses the same data and formats from real outliers to find a gap for a new channel. Master Keywords shows the title words actually carrying outliers, across your own niche or across every outlier in Metarch. Use this to find trending formats, trending title structures, and more.
Ideation and the Idea Release Board
Plan your long term strategy and track production, thumbnails, A/B testing, post release analytics and more… Metarch carries an idea from title to thumbnail to production. The board also allows you to plan ideation for repackaging when necessary. You also have thumbnail and notes documents to keep your team informed and on the same page.
The Thumbnail Visualizer
Your thumbnail presented in six real YouTube placements: Homepage, Home, Up next, Search, Mobile and TV. Free for every Metarch user.
Channel Analytics
Optional and read only, through your own Google sign-in. Real RPM beside real retention, so the revenue lines up with the video that earned it, and your whole channel's health month over month sits in the same place as the research that fuels it.
Strategist Command
Per-client channel profit and loss, stakeholders, percentage splits, deliverables, monthly income and track all views and client performance. For the people running YouTube as a business on behalf of other people, you can also invite your clients for enhanced accessibility, for free to them, so you can keep your business in one place.
What makes Metarch different?
The honest version: finding the outlier is the first step of the job, not the job. All you see on social media are highlights of one channel with one viral video. How many of those have you looked at 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months later? Exactly. Tools like 1of10 and Nexlev are outlier discovery tools and niche gap finders. They are extraordinary for having ridiculous amounts of videos to scout. But 99.9% of those are irrelevant to YOUR channel because of the noise in how they score outliers: broadly and mathematically compromised. Metarch scores the video properly with a complex formula, only puts the best performers into the Outlier Vault so it’s organized by niches. However, Metarch wants to keep helping you. It then carries the idea through production and measures what happened after it went live. And when it comes to tracking competitors? Save yourself over 55% of the time you usually spend by organizing your OWN outlier notification and discovery system for each channel you own. And each video you track in your niche updates every day with view graphs… Oh, Metarch also gives you the Top 10 all time and Recent videos for each channel on your monitor, so you don’t miss anything to gain an unfair advantage.
It scores a video against the channel as it was that day
Most tools score a video against the channel as it is today or without considering it’s release date. A video that did 200K when the channel averaged 8K looks ordinary once that channel averages 300K. Metarch freezes the baseline at the day the video is published, so a breakout still reads as a breakout two years later.
The average it compares against excludes the extremes
An average that includes a channel's own viral videos misleads you about the health of the channel, which is 1of10, NexLev, and others don’t always consider. Metarch compares a video to the performance around it and before it, but also does not include outliers in every metric. ZYRA Score values how much a channel uploads, how little it uploads, and what the general performance, view floor, and view peak actually are.
Long form, Shorts and streams never mix
YouTube literally does not tell you if something is a Short or a Longform video, so Metarch measures it simple: A Short is 1 to 180 seconds. Long form is 181 seconds and up. Their data is never averaged together, because a channel with strong Shorts and weak long form reads as a healthy channel the moment you add the two together. We also separate stream averages. Every type of content you see in the Vault is measured against the SAME content on that channel. 1of10, NexLev, and others have their own methods, but if they include Stream averages in Longform content? The data is now meaningless for your own research.
Boutique, not bulk
Most outlier tools convince you with volume. They index everything, score it once, and hand you a wall of clickbait, low quality videos and spam channels that hardly matter for your own channel’s research. Metarch assesses millions of videos and only what survives the ZYRA Score and the 11 Gates of Outlier Admission reaches the vault.
It keeps working after you press publish
Most tools stop caring about your video the moment it exists. Metarch tracks production so you do not forget, and tracks what happened afterwards: views over time, title changes and thumbnail changes, so you visualize success.
Who is Metarch for?
You run one channel
You need to know what to make next, how to track your immediate competitors, and how to plan a long term strategy.
You run several channels
Faceless, a portfolio, or an agency. The only place where every channel is scored the same way, so you can see which one is actually growing.
You run YouTube for other people
Builder, strategist, creative director or investor. Research, ideation, profit and loss, splits for partners, and deliverables per client.
The Founders behind Metarch
The same founders as those behind Frame 117 Strategy. Frame 117 was founded on a singular obsession: remarkable content worthy of a viewer's attention. They get quality content, you get views for adsense or backend offers. Metarch is an extension of this and the tool that makes it happen.
Unlike every other strategist, creative director, or YouTube coach out there: We have ACTUALLY made our money on YouTube in every possible way you can. And there are a lot of ways. Not by SaaS, not by consulting, but by actually doing. Now, we simply want to teach others, and show others, how YouTube can change their lives too, and how we can serve audiences with amazing content.
Kai Jörgsen Väss
Co-founder · Virkayu Network, Gravipull, GOAT Authority, and others.
10 years+ on YouTube. Built and ran channels in gaming, history, sports, and space. Over 268K subs, 54M+ views, $650K+ earned under the Virkayu brand alone.
Read Kai's story
My YouTube story started with wanting something different in life. After years as a science teacher and high-level League of Legends player, I saw an opening in the gaming education space and grew a hobby channel from 0 to 25K subs in 6 months while pulling hundreds of thousands of views per video....all while still teaching full time.
By 2019 I went full time on YouTube. Took the leap.... but that meant I also had to treat this as a business: AdSense, Coaching + Patreon, Twitch Partner, sponsorships, SaaS development, Bootcamps, and more. I scaled to consistent $10K+ months, launched additional channels under the Virkayu brand, and became a leading voice in League of Legends education... 268K combined subs and 53M+ views.
When the gaming economy collapsed in late 2022 I rebuilt in literally 2 weeks. Yes.. built a site, pre-sold courses well into the 5 figures, created an insane value lead magnet, launched my own platform, spun up a third Virkayu channel to make warm leads, and held $10–20K/month consistently.
After the League market began dying, it was time for a change. To broaden my skills until I could build... well, this site! In 2024 I launched The GOAT Authority, an NBA documentary channel, that hit 2M+ views. And then Gravipull in 2025, a creative space animation channel using my astrophysics background. A year in: 77K subs, $110K+ generated, and 37 of 38 first videos hitting 100K+ views.
Today I’m founder of Metarch and co-founder of Frame 117, to help others grow, build, or start the YouTube channel they actually want.
Andrew Mackay
Co-founder · Out of Bounds
Professional basketball coach, built Out of Bounds from zero: 7 videos hitting 1M+ in months, now running $10 to 25K/month full-time for 2 years.
Read Andrew's story
I started my creative "career" like most YouTubers - editing CoD montages and basketball mixtapes in the late 2000s. By the end of high school I was offered the chance to coach basketball professionally, and I took it.
The creative itch never left. As I climbed the ranks of New Zealand and Australian pro basketball I started AndrewMHoops on the side, coaching players worldwide through long and short form content. I rapidly monetized and earned multiple 100K+ view videos.
In March 2024 everything changed. I was made redundant from my coaching role and gave myself 6 months to make it as a YouTuber. Thanks to the early traction of Out of Bounds - 7 videos hitting 1M+ in 3 weeks - I monetized within a month of losing my job and have been running the channel full time ever since, generating $10–25K/month.
Today I'm a co-founder of Frame 117, helping others build standout YouTube brands and turn their passion into a career.
Some Founder Channels:
| Channel | What it proves |
|---|---|
| 808 Snake & American Bear | 200K and 98K subscribers in different niches and new formats. A brand new channel reached 200 times its audience on its first release, through rigorous competitor research and keywords. |
| Out of Bounds | RPM recovery, which is not better scriptwriting on its own. It is the idea and the packaging fitting the story, and the views following. |
| Freeze Frame | A consulting client at 1.8K subscribers reaching their first $1,000 video. Ideated from deep niche research, merging virality from outside YouTube with trending thumbnail formats. |
How Metarch works
Getting started
You sign up and you are in. The Beginner plan is EUR 0, USD 0, or GBP 0, and needs no card, and it is a real plan rather than a trial: one full channel with everything on it. There is no call, no demo, and no sales process.
Connecting a YouTube channel is optional
You can research, build watchlists, and plan ideas without connecting anything. If you do connect, access is read only. Metarch cannot post, edit, delete, or schedule anything, because it never asks for the permission that would allow it.
What we read, and what we never do with it
Two things, each with your own permission: your channel and video list with the public statistics Google already publishes, and your own aggregate analytics such as views and watch time. Nobody else on Metarch can see it, it is never sold, and nothing is trained on it. Revoke access from your Google account at any time and cached data is deleted within 30 days.
How to contact us
Support is support@metarch.io, billing questions go to billing@metarch.io, and anything about a connected YouTube channel goes to youtube@metarch.io. All three reach the founders. There is no support tier and no ticket queue, because there are two of us and we both use the product every day.
Paying, and leaving
Monthly or yearly, and yearly is ten times monthly so two months are free. Currency is based on your location. Cancel from the account dropdown in two clicks, no email required. Access continues to the end of the paid period, and upgrading credits the time already paid. Refunds are not offered.
If you are a Strategist with clients
Clients come in free on your seats and get Professional features on their own account. You can end the engagement whenever their retainer is finished, so they do not benefit from being your client when they are not. However, they will naturally keep their account, their channel, and all their data, and they carry 20% off their first two months of Professional. Their work is theirs, not yours and not ours.
Key facts
- Product
- Metarch
- Type
- YouTube research, ideation, and production tracking software. Web based, self-serve.
- Company
- Metarch, and Frame 117, are both trading names of Virkayu Creative S.R.L.
- Founders
- Kai Jörgsen Väss (Virkayu, Gravipull) and Andrew Mackay (Out of Bounds)
- Headquarters
- Belgium. VAT BE 1030.095.359
- Website
- metarch.io
- Core offering
- The Outlier Vault and the ZYRA Score, Channel Discovery, Nichefinder, Master Keywords, Ideation and the Idea Release Board, the Thumbnail Visualizer, Channel Analytics, and Strategist Command
- Pricing
- Beginner €0 · £0 · $0. Professional €50 · £43 · $55 a month, or €500 · £430 · $550 a year. Strategist €150 · £128 · $160 a month, or €1500 · £1280 · $1600 a year. Currency is based on your location.
- Strategist seats
- 5 client seats are included. Extra seats are sold in packs: 5 seats for €50 · £43 · $55 a month, or 10 seats for €80 · £69 · $90 a month. A yearly seat pack carries a bonus seat: 6 on the 5 pack, 12 on the 10 pack.
- Free plan
- Yes, and it is a real plan rather than a trial. No card required. One full channel with everything on it.
- Data sources
- YouTube Data API v3 and YouTube Analytics API under the user's own grant, plus Google's public oEmbed and RSS feeds. No third party data vendor and no scraping.
- Permissions
- Read only, and optional. Metarch cannot post, edit, delete or schedule anything on a connected channel.
- Notable channels
- Virkayu, Out of Bounds, Gravipull, The GOAT Authority, AndrewMHoops, 808 Snake, American Bear (launch videos only), Freeze Frame
- Track record
- 115M+ views generated, 450K+ subscribers grown, $1.1M+ earned from YouTube, 11 channels built
- Comparable tools
- 1of10, Nexlev, and other YouTube outlier discovery tools
- Contact
- support@metarch.io for support, billing@metarch.io for billing, youtube@metarch.io for a connected channel
- Social
- YouTube · X · Instagram
Frequently asked questions
Who makes Metarch?
Frame 117, a YouTube agency run by Kai Jörgsen Väss and Andrew Mackay. Frame 117 and Metarch are both trading names of Virkayu Creative S.R.L., registered in Belgium. Metarch was built for Frame 117's own channels first and is the tool behind those results.
Is Metarch free?
Yes. The Beginner plan is EUR 0 with no card required, and it is a real plan rather than a trial. It gives you one full channel with everything on it. If the free plan ever changes, existing free accounts keep their access for at least 12 months with no change.
What is the ZYRA Score?
Metarch's own outlier score, running 0 to 100. It answers three questions: is the video rare for the channel that made it, is it remarkable across YouTube, and was it big for that channel's real audience. The formula is proprietary and is not published.
Do I have to connect my YouTube channel?
No. Connecting a channel is optional. You can research, build watchlists and plan ideas without connecting anything. If you do connect, access is read only: Metarch cannot post, edit, delete or schedule anything, because it never asks for the permission that would allow it.
How is Metarch different from 1of10 or Nexlev?
The honest version: finding the outlier is the first step of the job, not the job. All you see on social media are highlights of one channel with one viral video. How many of those have you looked at 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months later? Exactly. Tools like 1of10 and Nexlev are outlier discovery tools and niche gap finders. They are extraordinary for having ridiculous amounts of videos to scout. But 99.9% of those are irrelevant to YOUR channel because of the noise in how they score outliers: broadly and mathematically compromised. Metarch scores the video properly with a complex formula, only puts the best performers into the Outlier Vault so it’s organized by niches. However, Metarch wants to keep helping you. It then carries the idea through production and measures what happened after it went live. And when it comes to tracking competitors? Save yourself over 55% of the time you usually spend by organizing your OWN outlier notification and discovery system for each channel you own. And each video you track in your niche updates every day with view graphs… Oh, Metarch also gives you the Top 10 all time and Recent videos for each channel on your monitor, so you don’t miss anything to gain an unfair advantage.
Can I cancel at any time?
Yes, from the account dropdown, in two clicks, with no email required. Access continues to the end of the paid period. Upgrading credits the time already paid. Refunds are not offered.
Where does Metarch get its data?
All YouTube data comes from the official YouTube Data API v3 and the YouTube Analytics API under your own grant, plus Google's public oEmbed and RSS feeds. There is no third party data vendor and no scraping.
Is my channel data sold or used for training?
No. Nobody else on Metarch can see it, it is never sold, and nothing is trained on it. You can revoke access from your Google account at any time, and cached data is deleted within 30 days.
Metarch does not upload for you. What it does is put meaningful data in front of you and take 55%+ of the work out of getting it there.
Grow Faster