Detecting and Replacing Stale Video Content Automatically

Introduction Videos disappear from the internet constantly. They get deleted, marked private, or copyright-struck. If you run a video curation platform, stale content is your enemy. Here's the automated detection and replacement system I built for ViralVidVault . Why Videos Go Stale From monitoring thousands of videos across viralvidvault.com , here are the most common reasons: Deleted by uploader — ~40% of stale videos Made private — ~25% Copyright claim — ~20% Region-restricted — ~10% (especially relevant for European content) Terms violation — ~5% The Freshness Check Pipeline <?php class FreshnessChecker { private \PDO $db ; private YouTubeClient $youtube ; public function __construct ( \PDO $db , YouTubeClient $youtube ) { $this -> db = $db ; $this -> youtube = $youtube ; } public function checkBatch ( int $batchSize = 50 ): FreshnessResult { // Get videos due for checking, oldest-checked first $stmt = $this -> db -> prepare ( ' SELECT id, title, category_id, last_checked FROM vide