YouTube Data Scraping
If you need to scrape video data from YouTube, you may be looking for a YouTube Scraper or perhaps you’re interested in building one yourself. While you’ll find many third party YouTube video scrapers, it’s important to understand exactly how they work and how they perform their YouTube data download to get CSV files onto your computer.
On one end of the spectrum, most of the easier-to-use YouTube scrapers or extensions will hijack your computer and IP address to browse YouTube web pages to extract data from the web browser and trying (poorly) to parse out the visual data into usable content.
Not only are these approaches violations of YouTube’s Terms of Service, but they are also illegal as a third party cannot help you violate another company’s Terms of Service and lawsuits are already being filed.
Do you really want to depend on a web scraping service thatβs likely to get sued in the future? You may even become part of the lawsuit in the discovery process!
Additionally, any desktop-run scraping tools running on your computer will jeopardize your IP address and reputation, resulting in being blocked & banned from YouTube and potentially all of Google!
You may also have tried building your own “screen scraper,” perhaps with a Python module or Selenium for browser automation, but you can be assured that these approaches will all break eventually as YouTube constantly tests and updates its frontend website.
Work With YouTube’s API Instead of Against It
YouTube is not only a top social media platform, but also the 2nd most popular search engine in the world, only behind Google. But unlike Google, YouTube offers an Official Data API to download YouTube video data, search results, comments & much more.
This data is invaluable for anyone monitoring their own YouTube search engine optimization, performing content research, analyzing comments or building entirely new ways to collect data for research.
YouTube API Pricing
All of this data sounds so valuable in fact, you may be wondering just how much it costs. Well the good news is that if you need to make a moderate amount of queries, it’s absolutely free! Google provides a pretty generous usage quota (up to 10,000 API requests per day depending on how much data you get back).
Light
For example, if you’re performing a very simple query like the YouTube API Get Video URL Endpoint, you’ll incur a minimal quota charge as you’re just getting back identifying information about a video.
Medium
But if you’re using the YouTube Channel API for example to call the YouTube Channel Statistics API for channel description, subscriber count, view count, age of the channel, and other channel data based on a channel ID, then it may cost say 2 units per request, so in this example you’d be limited to only 5,000 requests per day (please check the official YouTube docs for exact numbers, this is just an example).
Heavy
And some use cases like the YouTube API Get All Videos from Playlist Endpoint will require pagination to scrape the full list of videos for a playlist ID. This means you will need to make multiple requests (per page) if a playlist contains many videos (say over 100), so you’ll incur a credit cap based on how many pages you need to scrape to collect all of the playlist videos.
Is it Hard to Use?
You may be hesitant to use an API because it sounds complicated, but we’ll do our best here to show you how to get started with data scraping in a few easy steps.
All you need to get started is a Google Account and basic knowledge of making HTTP requests. If this is too complex, we explain how to use our scraping service at the end, which lets you download CSV files of YouTube data with just a few clicks!
Get Your YouTube API Key
The first step to getting YouTube data from the API is to obtain an API key from the Google Developer Platform. We’ve created a step-by-step guide on How to Get a YouTube API Key in 5 Minutes and legally scrape thousands of videos, channels, comments & more per month.
Scraping YouTube Search Results
We’ll start with a simple example of scraping search results from YouTube’s Data API using the Search List Endpoint:
curl --request GET 'https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=snippet&q=beer&key=$API_KEY'
Simply replace $API_KEY with your own API Key we mentioned earlier. You can also just query the full URL in a web browser, since it’s a simple GET request without any headers. Your response will look something like this:
{
"kind": "youtube#searchListResponse",
"etag": "APJ66SWxT6NXh5BQp21zbcHQXJI",
"nextPageToken": "CDIQAA",
"regionCode": "US",
"pageInfo": {
"totalResults": 1000000,
"resultsPerPage": 50
},
"items": [
{
"kind": "youtube#searchResult",
"etag": "5hxvPhBM7fCUpUgOyCyXCpfnVQ4",
"id": {
"kind": "youtube#video",
"videoId": "cU0g-Ut0Kqc"
},
"snippet": {
"publishedAt": "2022-08-31T15:08:51Z",
"channelId": "UCXnyK-TfLyZ8O6aXXFk76jg",
"title": "Is beer better than wine with food? | The Craft Beer Channel",
"description": "This week we're down at Westminster Catering College's Escoffier restaurant for an incredible four-course beer and food ...",
"thumbnails": {
"default": {
"url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cU0g-Ut0Kqc/default.jpg",
"width": 120,
"height": 90
},
"medium": {
"url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cU0g-Ut0Kqc/mqdefault.jpg",
"width": 320,
"height": 180
},
"high": {
"url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cU0g-Ut0Kqc/hqdefault.jpg",
"width": 480,
"height": 360
}
},
"channelTitle": "The Craft Beer Channel",
"liveBroadcastContent": "none",
"publishTime": "2022-08-31T15:08:51Z"
}
},
...
]
}
Python YouTube Scraping via API
While you’re welcome to access the YouTube Data API via your web browser or through curl commands, it’s not the most useful way to collect data. You will ideally want to work with the data in a CSV file where you can upload it into many different tools and services to make sense of the scraped data.
If you’re set on having the most control over your scraping and are comfortable with coding, we recommend checking out the Python Google API Client as it queries the official API and will not suddenly break like other Python modules that attempt to scrape YouTube’s website. While the library doesn’t offer native CSV file exports, you’ll be able to achieve this with basic Python knowledge. You can also look for other API clients, just make sure they actually use the official API!
No-Code YouTube Data API Scraping Service
If you’d rather not reinvent the wheel to get CSV data back from the Data API, we offer a paid service to collect YouTube data from any official endpoint as CSV files without having to write or maintain any code.
Basic Plan
You can use our basic plan to download individual API endpoint results as CSV files, one at a time. This is great if you’re just getting started and don’t need a lot of data yet. For example, using our search example above, we can scrape the first 50 search results using the YouTube API Video Search Results Scraper, which will let you experiment and download CSV files of video information:
Plus Plan
Our plus plan will scrape up to thousands of YouTube videos, channels, comments, playlists & more from YouTube on your behalf, performing pagination for you and combining multiple search terms together. This can help you keep track of search result rankings for a list of keywords relevant to your business.
And unlike Python modules, our system is completely cloud-based and scalable. Hence, we can run jobs for you that take hours (e.g. scraping 100s of videos’ comments) effortlessly on our system while you focus on how you’re going to use this data effectively.
Need More YouTube Scraping Functionality?
Our platform is 100% customizable! If you need to add or change some parameters for any endpoint, simply clone the endpoint and make your changes (which will only be visible to you). You can also tweak your own workflows for bulk data collection and add or remove extractors to capture different types of data returned automatically. Simply reach out to support if you need any help with this!
