YouTube channels with high subscriber counts (60k+) can have spam/bot videos with <100 views despite being uploaded days ago. Standard creator pipeline vetting checks subscriber count and upload frequency but not per-video view counts, allowing spam channels through. The resulting calculator views are low quality and waste view creation budget. The YouTube Data API videos().list(part='statistics') call is already needed for duration filtering — adding view count filtering costs zero additional API quota.
Extend your fetch_video_stats() call (which already fetches part='contentDetails' for duration) to also include part='contentDetails,statistics' and extract statistics.viewCount. Add a --min-video-views CLI flag (default 1000) and filter in the select stage alongside duration filtering. This catches spam channels where subscriber count is inflated but actual video engagement is near zero. The API call cost is identical since statistics and contentDetails can be fetched in the same videos().list() request — just add statistics to the part parameter.