The Origins: Modest Labs & SocialBlade

The project you know today as banner.yt (originally banner.tf) was first created by the talented developers at Modest Labs, the same great team behind SocialBlade.com.

SocialBlade has been tracking YouTube channel statistics since 2008 and is one of the most visited YouTube analytics sites in the world. Their team realized that getting channel banners via the official YouTube Data API was painful, so they built the original banner.tf to solve that problem.

The Acquisition and Rewrite

Over time, the original project became slightly outdated. In order to bring it into the modern web ecosystem, we took over the project from Modest Labs. We completely acquired the platform so they no longer own or operate it.

Once we took over, we rebranded the service from banner.tf to banner.yt (which is much more fitting for YouTube banners), and rewrote the entire platform from the ground up.

What's New in the Rewrite?

Next.js 16 App Router: Blazing fast performance and React server components.
Advanced Image Processing: Support for WebP (default), AVIF, high-resolution JPEGs, and custom resizing.
Deeper Integrations: A highly advanced API, structured JSON channel data, and new embedding tools.
No-key Access: Keeping it free, simple, and requiring zero sign-ups or API keys, just like the original philosophy but faster!

Contact

We are incredibly grateful to the team at Modest Labs for their original work on the tool. Today, banner.yt is a fully independent project. Reach us at [email protected] for questions, API issues, or business inquiries.