YouTube Data API (v3): limits, operations, resources, methods etc.

Where is YouTube API applied?

In what fields is YouTube Data applied? First of all, we’re talking about the developers of website products and unique solutions. The other user groups are not so large: webmasters who use YouTube as the source of content for their sites, and researched who need to conduct a research with a large audience. API key usage examples:

• Plugin

Add API Key to ensure a YouTube plugin’s stable performance.

• Your Product

Add the key to your product to get access to YouTube Data.

• Parsing

Use the key to parse YouTube data in a more efficient way.

See also: detailed guide on getting a YouTube API Key

YouTube API limits

These limits are the restrictions to requests, sent out with a YouTube API. When the quota on your personal YouTube API Key is exceeded, your actions will be suspended until you get a new quota.

You can find out the quota required for each action in the quota calculator.

Daily quota: 1 000 000 units. Cost of operations:

• Read operation – 1 unit;
• Write operation – 50 units;
• Video upload – 1600 units.

*Please, keep in mind that when you perform insert and update operations, they write data and so also return a resource. So the operation of inserting a playlist requires a quota of 50 units for the write operation, and the cost of the returned playlist resource.

What can you do with the 1 000 000 units a day limit:

– 200 000 read operations; – 10 000 write operations and 90 000 read operations; – 400 video uploads, 1500 write operations and 50 000 read operations; *operations that each retrieve two resource parts

Actions available with YouTube API

YouTube allows to apply 4 different methods to each information source:

• List (GET) – Returns a list of information’s that match the API request parameters.
• Insert (POST) – Uploads an element to YouTube and optionally sets the video’s metadata.
• Update (PUT) – Updates a video’s information.
• Delete (DELETE) – Deletes a YouTube element.

This is how you can apply a method to a source:

	List	Insert	Update	Delete
activity	+	+	–	–
caption	+	+	+	+
channel	+	–	–	–
channelBanner	–	+	–	–
channelSection	+	+	+	+
comment	+	+	+	+
commentThread	+	+	+	–
guideCategory	+	–	–	–
i18nLanguage	+	–	–	–
i18nRegion	+	–	–	–
playlist	+	+	+	+
playlistItem	+	+	+	+
search result	+	–	–	–
subscription	+	–	–	–
thumbnail	–	–	–	–
video	+	+	+	+
videoCategory	+	–	–	–
watermark	–	–	–	–

Keep in mind that there are additional requirements for the videos uploaded via API. Read more: YouTube requirements to uploaded videos.

Resource types

Below are the resource types and the information you can get from these resources.

activity	Likes, marking videos as favorites, channel videos and other activities of a specific user.
channel	Channel information.
channelBanner	Identifies the URL of a channel’s banner image.
channelSection	Channel’s latest uploads, most popular videos, playlists and other sets of videos from the channel.
guideCategory	Channel category, as defined by YouTube based on the content, popularity and other factos.
i18nLanguage	Identifies user interface language.
i18nRegion	Identifies the perferrable content geographical area.
playlist	Provides one playlist (set of videos).
playlistItem	Identifies a specific video from the playlist and the way it is used in the playlist.
search result	Video, playlist or channel that match the search criteria.
subscription	User subscription information.
thumbnail	Identifies the resource’s thumbnail image.
video	Provides one specific video.
videoCategory	Identifies the uploaded videos category
watermark	Video watermark during playback.

Optimizing work with YouTube API

• Use ETags – a standard part of HTTP protocol that lets you cache the requests, thus making the API reply faster, and also prevents your apps from writing the changes from 3rd-party APIs.
• Use GZIP – compression that reduces the cost of each API response, but does spend additional CPU resources for decompressing.