Scrape YouTube Videos
Scraping YouTube videos is not only easy, but encouraged from YouTube itself while using the official YouTube API! There are many reasons to scrape YouTube videos, ranging from analyzing your own content, tracking search result rankings and changes, and seeing what video concepts are working for your competitors.
This page hosts a number of different ways you can scrape these videos from the YouTube API. For example, you may want to collect all of the videos for a specific channel. You may also want to collect videos for a specific playlist, or just track search results for a specific niche you’re interested in. You can even use the API to automatically poll whatever video source you’d like and alert you when new videos are added.
Querying the API
Simply pick one of the links above to get started and enter in the required search terms, channel IDs, etc… You will need to provide your own YouTube API key, which is free and easy to get. Our service will then query the YouTube API on your behalf and transform the raw results into downloadable CSV files you can begin using instantly, without writing any code to get started.
Video Content
Note that you will NOT be able to download the actual content (video files) from YouTube via its API. However, you will get a links to the thumbnails for the videos returned from video search, as long as that’s included in the part parameter you send the API (which it typically is by default in the “snippet” value we default to in our service). If you need to download raw video files, you can do this using the normal YouTube website.
Video Statistics
These endpoints will not return statistics for videos, e.g. view counts, like counts, etc… For that, you’ll need to look for the “Video Details” endpoint on our YouTube Scraper which accepts a Video ID and returns this information. We have several workflows that automate this process for you. For example, if you want to run a search for videos and then extract out their details, you can use the YouTube Search -> Video Details Workflow.