Did you know that YouTube had an API? And did you know that this API can be used to get all the data you need for a cool data science project? Well, now you do.
In this article we will demonstrate how to use it to get a rich dataset which will allow us to analyze and compare the top tech channels.
In order to be able to make requests to the YouTube API we need to follow these steps:
- Create a new project in your Google Developers Console — all you need is a Google account to do this
- Request an API key on the “CREDENTIALS” tab by clicking “CREATE CREDENTIALS”
- Enable the YouTube API service by clicking on “ENABLE APIS AND SERVICES” on your dashboard then search and tick the “YouTube Data API v3”
And we are now ready to call the API to get our data.
A more detailed version of these explanations are available on Google documentation if necessary:
Now that we have everything we need, let’s get coding!
In this article we will:
- Get a channel basic information (creation date, description, number of videos, number of subscribers, …)
- Get all video details of this channel (title, description, duration, views, likes, …)
- Do this for the 5 channels we want to investigate
- Build some (interesting) analyses around this data
In order to kick start our project, we first need to install the google api client library (pip install google-api-python-client
) and import the 2 libraries we will use throughout (pandas and the google api client library). We also store our API key and build this youtube object which will allow us to make the API…