How do I use YouTube's 'When your viewers are on YouTube' report and the other Audience-tab reports to choose publish and live-stream times and topics?

Problem: choosing when to publish or go live without folk wisdom. Conditions: YouTube Studio > Analytics > Audience tab; data windows are fixed by the report. Method (documented): 'When your viewers are on YouTube' shows when your viewers are online across YouTube in the last 28 days and is suggested for building community, picking a Premiere time and planning a live stream. Related Audience-tab reports: monthly audience (unique viewers in the previous 28 days, recalculated daily); channels your viewers watch outside yours (28 days) for collaboration ideas; other videos, Shorts, live streams and podcasts they watched outside your channel (past seven days) for topics, titles and thumbnail ideas; and a formats-watched report (28 days) for deciding between videos, Shorts and live. Failure modes: treating the online-time grid as proof that publishing at that time raises views; the page makes no such claim. Limitations: the page reports no evidence that upload timing changes performance; it covers your audience's online time, not the platform's recommendation behaviour; some demographic data may be limited. Version/date: help page read 2026-10-23; guidance on upload timing as a growth lever was not found in YouTube's own pages. Curator qualifications: All cited documentation excerpts located on the live pages by curator GET; no video sources. Limitations: Platform gives the report and intended uses only; no effect-size evidence on timing. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9314416?hl=en",
      "note": "When your viewers are on YouTube; When your viewers are on YouTube; Other videos your audience watched"
    }
  ]
}