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YouTube Data API

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Austin Cullar edited this page Oct 11, 2024 · 6 revisions

Overview

Astro utilizes the YouTube Data API for data collection. In order to use the API, you need to create an API key.

Creating a YouTube API key

The steps I used are:

  1. Login to Google Developers Console.
  2. Create a new project.
  3. On the new project dashboard, click Enable APIs and Services.
Screenshot 2024-09-27 at 10 59 05 PM
  1. In the library, navigate to YouTube Data API v3 under YouTube APIs.
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  1. Click the YouTube Data API v3 tile, and enable the API on the next screen.
  2. Create credentials.
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  1. A screen will appear with the API key.

API Quirks

Helpful information about the API.

Quotas

The YouTube Data API works on a quota system, restricting API usage for each user per 24 hour period in order to protect service quality. In a 24 hour period, an API user is not allowed 10,000 quotas. Each API call has a different quota cost, which can be viewed here. Astro is currently only performing read (or 'list') operations, which are the cheapest API calls, costing just 1 quota each. Therefore, it is unlikely that data collection with Astro with ever meet/exceed this quota limit.

Comment count

The commentCount field returned in the API response for video metadata is not always accurate.

I noticed this while working on adding a progress bar for downloading comments from a video, since I was planning to use the comment count as the 'width' or 'step count' of the progress bar (250 comments = 250 steps on the progress bar, reading 50 comments means advancing the progress bar 50 steps). When running some tests against a video with 336 comments, I noticed that my code would download 330 and then stop, leaving my progress bar to wait infinitely without completing. Thinking this was a bug in my code, I checked the dataframe constructed from the comment data, and it reflected 330.

Some online reading indicated that this may be because the mysterious 6 missing comments had some kind of moderative action taken against them. This could include:

  • Filtering rules
    • The video's author has filtering rules in place which block comments containing certain words/strings. When these comments get filtered out, then become invisible to every other user besides the comment author.
  • YouTube moderation
    • The comment was detected/flagged by YouTube's automated moderation service, restricting visibility of the comment.
    • If the video's author has blocked the user attempting to comment, it seems said comment would still be included in the overall count, but its visibility is restricted.
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