Send your first YouTube API request

Send synchronous requests to all 3 Bright Data YouTube Scraper API endpoints with copy-paste examples for channels, videos and comments collection.

This tutorial walks you through sending a synchronous request to each Bright Data YouTube Scraper API endpoint. By the end, you’ll have working examples for channels, videos, and comments.

Prerequisites

• A Bright Data account with an active API key
• Completed the Quickstart

Request structure

Every synchronous request follows the same pattern:

POST https://api.brightdata.com/datasets/v3/scrape?dataset_id={DATASET_ID}&format=json
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY
Content-Type: application/json

[{"url": "https://www.youtube.com/..."}]

The only thing that changes between endpoints is the dataset_id and the input URL format.

Synchronous requests support up to 20 URLs and have a 1-minute timeout. If the request takes longer, the API automatically returns a snapshot_id instead. See async requests.

How to scrape YouTube channels

Dataset ID: gd_lk538t2k2p1k3oos71

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.brightdata.com/datasets/v3/scrape?dataset_id=gd_lk538t2k2p1k3oos71&format=json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '[{"url": "https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast"}]'

You should see a 200 response. This takes 10-30 seconds.

Example response

[
  {
    "channel_name": "MrBeast",
    "channel_url": "https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast",
    "subscribers": 358000000,
    "total_videos": 850,
    "total_views": 50000000000,
    "description": "...",
    "is_verified": true
  }
]

Full Channels response schema

How to scrape YouTube videos

Dataset ID: gd_lk56epmy2i5g7lzu0k

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.brightdata.com/datasets/v3/scrape?dataset_id=gd_lk56epmy2i5g7lzu0k&format=json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '[{"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"}]'

Example response

[
  {
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up",
    "channel_name": "Rick Astley",
    "views": 1500000000,
    "likes": 16000000,
    "date_posted": "2009-10-25T00:00:00.000Z",
    "duration": "3:33",
    "description": "...",
    "num_comments": 2700000
  }
]

Full Videos response schema

How to scrape YouTube comments

Dataset ID: gd_lk9q0ew71spt1mxywf

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.brightdata.com/datasets/v3/scrape?dataset_id=gd_lk9q0ew71spt1mxywf&format=json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '[{"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"}]'

Example response

[
  {
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "comment_user": "user123",
    "comment_user_url": "https://www.youtube.com/@user123",
    "comment_date": "2024-04-05T12:30:00.000Z",
    "comment": "This song never gets old!",
    "likes": 250,
    "replies": 12,
    "comment_id": "UgyKz0..."
  }
]

Full Comments response schema

Quick reference: dataset IDs

Endpoint	Dataset ID	URL pattern
Videos	gd_lk56epmy2i5g7lzu0k	youtube.com/watch?v={video_id}
Channels	gd_lk538t2k2p1k3oos71	youtube.com/@{handle}
Comments	gd_lk9q0ew71spt1mxywf	youtube.com/watch?v={video_id}

Output formats

Control the response format with the format query parameter:

Value	Description
json	JSON array (default)
ndjson	Newline-delimited JSON, one record per line
csv	Comma-separated values

Next steps

Async batch requests

Scrape hundreds of URLs in a single batch job.

API reference

Full parameter and response field reference.