How to get Youtube channel details using Youtube data API if channel has custom url

Question

I would like to fetch details of a YouTube channel which has a custom URL, like https://www.youtube.com/c/pratiksinhchudasamaisawesome.

Custom channel URLs follow this format: https://www.youtube.com/c/{custom_channel_name}.

I can fetch the details of YouTube channels by Channel ID and username without any issues. Unfortunately, I need to use the custom channel URL which is the only time I encounter this issue.

I developed my app few months ago, and the custom channel URL was working up until a few days ago. Now, the YouTube data API does not return anything for the YouTube custom channel URL if I try get details using their custom name.

To get the details of this channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/thenewboston, for example, the request would be:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels?part=snippet&forUsername=thenewboston&key={YOUR_API_KEY}

Response

200
- SHOW HEADERS -
{
 "kind": "youtube#channelListResponse",
 "etag": "\"zekp1FB4kTkkM-rWc1qIAAt-BWc/8Dz6-vPu69KX3yZxVCT3-M9YWQA\"",
 "pageInfo": {
  "totalResults": 1,
  "resultsPerPage": 5
 },
 "items": [
  {

   "kind": "youtube#channel",
   "etag": "\"zekp1FB4kTkkM-rWc1qIAAt-BWc/KlQLDlUPRAmACwKt9V8V2yrOfEg\"",
   "id": "UCJbPGzawDH1njbqV-D5HqKw",
   "snippet": {
    "title": "thenewboston",
    "description": "Tons of sweet computer related tutorials and some other awesome videos too!",
    "publishedAt": "2008-02-04T16:09:31.000Z",
    "thumbnails": {
     "default": {
      "url": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/--n5ELY2uT-U/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/d9JvaIEpstw/s88-c-k-no-rj-c0xffffff/photo.jpg"
     },
     "medium": {
      "url": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/--n5ELY2uT-U/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/d9JvaIEpstw/s240-c-k-no-rj-c0xffffff/photo.jpg"
     },
     "high": {
      "url": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/--n5ELY2uT-U/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/d9JvaIEpstw/s240-c-k-no-rj-c0xffffff/photo.jpg"
     }
    },
    "localized": {
     "title": "thenewboston",
     "description": "Tons of sweet computer related tutorials and some other awesome videos too!"
    }
   }
  }
 ]
}

It works perfectly.

Now we have to get details of these channels:

• https://www.youtube.com/c/eretteretlenek
• https://www.youtube.com/c/annacavalli

Then we get:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels?part=snippet&forUsername=annacavalli&key={YOUR_API_KEY}

Response

200
- SHOW HEADERS -
{
 "kind": "youtube#channelListResponse",
 "etag": "\"zekp1FB4kTkkM-rWc1qIAAt-BWc/TAiG4jjJ-NTZu7gPKn7WGmuaZb8\"",
 "pageInfo": {
  "totalResults": 0,
  "resultsPerPage": 5
 },
 "items": [
 ]
}

This can be easily reproduced using the API explorer.

Russophobe

This looks like it could be a bug with their API. Why not report it and see if Google will fix it for you? – Superiority

It's not a bug, but rather a missing feature. Usernames (which come from old times, before YouTube and Google Plus integration) are not the same as custom channel identifiers, so it is expected that forUsername filter does not work that way. – Onerous

Does the Youtube API still not support this in 2018? – Boak

It is 2021 and this feature is still not supported (or at least not working for me when using a forUserName or id attribute as a lookup) – Carlstrom

It is 2022 and this feature is still not supported. – Brittnee

For those who come across this after the latest Data API revision (31st January, 2024), they provided the forHandle query parameter to get data of a handle/username. You can refer to this answer for details here: https://mcmap.net/q/102620/-youtube-listchannels-with-username-forusername-is-not-working – Forte

Answer 1

Simplest solution, using API only, is to just use Search:list method of YouTube Data API. From what I can tell (mind you, this is from my own research, official docs say nothing on this subject!), if you search using the custom URL component, with "channel" result type filter and "relevance" (default) sorting, first result should be what you're looking for.

So the following query gets 16 results, with the first one being the one you're looking for. Same goes for all other custom channel URLs I tested, so I think this is the most reliable way of doing this.

GET https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=id%2Csnippet&q=annacavalli&type=channel&key={YOUR_API_KEY}

The other idea is just scraping YouTube page at the custom URL, where you can find ChannelID in one of the meta tags in HTML code. But that's ineffective, unreliable and AFAIK in violation of YouTube terms of use.

Edit: Well, it returns no results for smaller channels, so it's not reliable at all.

Onerous

it's almost what we are looking for, except that "kind": "youtube#searchResult" instead of "kind": "youtube#activity" – Streptococcus

Is there a way to get the id of small channels ? – Bramante

@MahmoudHanafy I don't see any other ways of getting channelId from custom url other than the methods I described. – Onerous

Thanks a lot @jkondratowicz, your answer helped me. – Sewellel

@Onerous based on my experience, there is a big chance, that you fail to match necessary channel in first search result. So you will have to loop in search results, get the channel ids, then get channel resource from the list of channels that you have and match custom URL, that you initially have – Cantor

Just a heads up: the search list endpoint costs 100 units per request (compared to 1 unit for a channel list request). So even if the channel list request is unreliable, it might be worth to try it first anyways. – Dulcimer

Answer 2

Workaround

Expanding off of @jkondratowicz answer, using the search.list in combination with channels.list you can most of the time resolve the channel from the custom url value.

The channel resource has a property customUrl so if we take the channels from the search.list results and get that extra detail about them from the channels.list it is possible to try and match up the custom url value with the customUrl property.

A working JavaScript method here, just replace the api key with your own. Though it is still not perfect, this tries the first 50 channels returned. More could be done with paging and pageTokens.

function getChannel(customValue, callback) {
    const API_KEY = "your_api_key"
    $.ajax({
        dataType: "json",
        type: "GET",
        url: "https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search",
        data: {
            key: API_KEY,
            part: "snippet",
            q: customValue,
            maxResults: 50,
            order: 'relevance',
            type: 'channel'
        }
    }).done(function (res) {
        const channelIds = [];
        for (let i=0; i<res.items.length; i++) {
            channelIds.push(res.items[i].id.channelId);
        }

        $.ajax({
            dataType: "json",
            type: "GET",
            url: "https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels",
            data: {
                key: API_KEY,
                part: "snippet",
                id: channelIds.join(","),
                maxResults: 50
            }
        }).done(function (res) {
            if (res.items) {
                for (let i=0; i<res.items.length; i++) {
                    const item = res.items[i];
                    if (item.snippet.hasOwnProperty("customUrl") && customValue.toLowerCase() === item.snippet.customUrl.toLowerCase()) {
                        callback(item);
                    }
                }
            }
        }).fail(function (err) {
            logger.err(err);
        });
    }).fail(function (err) {
        logger.err(err);
    });
}

A good example using it with https://www.youtube.com/c/creatoracademy.

getChannel('creatoracademy', function (channel) {
    console.log(channel);
});

However, it is still unreliable as it depends on if the channel comes back in the original search.list query. It seems possible that if the custom channel url is too generic that the actual channel may not come back in the search.list results. Though this method is much more reliable then depending on the first entry of search.list to be the right one as search results don't always come back in the same order.

Issue

There has been at least three feature requests to Google in the past year requesting for an additional parameter for this custom url value but they were all denied as being infeasible. Apparently it is too difficult to implement. It was also mentioned as not being on their roadmap.

• https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/174903934 (Dec 2020)
• https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/165676622 (Aug 2020)
• https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/161718177 (Jul 2020)

Resources

• Google: Understand your channel URLs
• Search: list | YouTube Data API
• Channels: list | YouTube Data API

Brook

Answer 3

An alternative way is to use a parser (PHP Simple HTLM DOM parser, for the example below : PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser) :

<?php
$media_url = 'https://www.youtube.com/c/[Channel name]';

$dom = new simple_html_dom();
$html = $dom->load(curl_get($media_url));
if (null !== ($html->find('meta[itemprop=channelId]',0))) {
    $channelId = $html->find('meta[itemprop=channelId]',0)->content;
}
?>

(Using Youtube api's "search" method has a quota cost of 100)

Myopic

This works well... I'm wondering if Google will penalize my app if I do this, I don't expect to be calling this code very often but a couple of times a day maybe 🤷‍♂️ – Crassulaceous

I would suggest using the about page https://www.youtube.com/c/{channle name}/about , the html response is x3 smaller (~300kb vs 1MB) – Bollinger

Answer 4

It is possible the get the channel ID by the video ID, that can help depends on the need fo your application.

Here are an example:

        $queryParams = [
            'id' => 'UcDjWCEvZLM'
        ];
        $response = $service->videos->listVideos('snippet', $queryParams)->getItems();
        $channelId = $response[0]->snippet['channelId'];
        $channelTitle = $response[0]->snippet['channelTitle'];

Accordion

Answer 5

I'm assuming that only channels with videos uploaded by the channel owner will be of interest. This is accidentally convenient since my method doesn't work with 0 video channels anyway.

Given a channel's url, my method will get the beautifulsoup HTML object of that channel's videos tab, and scrape the HTML to find the unique channel id. It'll then reconstruct everything and give back the channel url with the unique channel id.

your_channel_url = 'Enter your channel url here'
channel_url = your_channel_url.strip("https://").strip("featured")
https = "https://"
channel_vids_tab = https + channel_url + '/videos'

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

source = requests.get(channel_vids_tab).text
soup = BeautifulSoup(source, "html.parser")

a = soup.find('body').find('link')['href']
channel_id = a.split('/')[-1]

print(a)
print(channel_id)

This method bypass the headache of one channel having different /user and /c url (for example /user/vechz and /c/vechz vs /c/coreyms and /user/schafer5 leading to the same page). Though you need to manually enter the url at first, it can be easily automated.

I'm also fairly confident that if a channel has 0 videos, this line of thinking can also apply for the playlist created BY the channel owner, and only needs a little tweaking. But if there's 0 videos or playlist created by the channel ... who knows

Cursory

Answer 6

As @jkondratowicz noted, there is no way to reliably get this from the API as small channels do not return at the top of the search results.

So here is a JS example of how to get the channel id by extracting it from the HTML channel page (h/t @Feign'):

export const getChannelIdForCustomUrl = async (customUrl: string) => {
  const page = await axios.get(`https://www.youtube.com/c/${customUrl}`)

  const chanId = page.data.match(/channelId":"(.*?)"/)[1]

  return chanId
}

Monachism

Answer 7

Here is the .NET approach to convert custom Channel name/URL to a ChannelId using search API as mentioned in the accepted answer.

        // https://www.youtube.com/c/TheQ_original/videos
        // they call custom URL ?
        // https://mcmap.net/q/102623/-how-to-get-youtube-channel-details-using-youtube-data-api-if-channel-has-custom-url
        // https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/channels#snippet.customUrl
        // GET https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=id%2Csnippet&q=annacavalli&type=channel&key={YOUR_API_KEY}

        // 
        /// <summary>
        /// Returns ChannelID from old "Custom Channel Name/URL"
        /// Support the following URLs format
        /// https://www.youtube.com/c/MakeYourOWNCreation
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="ChannelName"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        // 20220701
        public async Task<string> CustomChannelNameToChannelId(String ChannelName)
        {
            var YoutubeService = YouTubeService();
            //
            List<YouTubeInfo> VideoInfos = new List<YouTubeInfo>();
            // 
            // -) Step1: Retrieve 1st page of channels info
            var SearchListRequest = YoutubeService.Search.List("snippet");
            SearchListRequest.Q = ChannelName;
            SearchListRequest.Type = "channel";
            //
            SearchListRequest.MaxResults = 50;
            // Call the search.list method to retrieve results matching the specified query term.
            var SearchListResponse = await SearchListRequest.ExecuteAsync();
            // According to the SO post the custom channel will be the first one
            var searchResult = SearchListResponse.Items[0];
            //
            // Return Channel Information, we care to obtain ChannelID
            return searchResult.Id.ChannelId;
        }

Picrite