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Comment by pvankessel | Hacker News Reader

This is really great - and kudos for providing methodological details and code! I love seeing this kind of large-scale descriptive research, it's a real bummer that YouTube is starting to close up access to their API. We did a similar kind of analysis looking at videos posted by popular channels last year, including some analysis of keywords that boosted views - figure you might find it interesting (and I'd love to see if our findings hold up with your dataset!) https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/07/25/a-week-in-th...

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Thank you.. The analysis you've done seems really interesting and gave me some more ideas to implement in future analyses.

For keywords that boost views, I'll run a similar analysis on my data and report the results to you here in another comment. Probably this weekend.

And I just heard from you that YouTube is starting to close up access to their API. I visit YT API website from time to time but haven't noticed such a thing. It's really a bummer. They should be more open not the opposite. Do you have some source if I want to know more about that?

Would love to see what you come up with, will stay tuned!

As for the API restrictions, they aren't advertising it but about a year ago they started warning users about forthcoming extensive audits to maintain access, and about six months ago they started reducing access for API keys if you stopped maxing them out for a day or more. Our last API key got shut down for good a couple of weeks ago. We're going to try to fill out the form and get our access reinstated, but I'm not sure how willing they'll be to allow access for research. The form seems intended for client-facing apps. But who knows - Facebook/CrowdTangle/Twitter have been very supportive of legitimate research initiatives, I'm hoping YouTube follows that trend!

To clarify - the current API has a limit of 10,000 "query points" per day for new API keys (most endpoints cost 1-5 points per query). It used to be 1 million; they've since throttled everyone down and started forcing audits. 10k is still something, but it certainly doesn't allow large scale research.

It used to be 50 million, it used to be 500000% more. I would have expected it to increase as bandwidth got cheaper yet it for whatever reason has decreased.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15568405/youtube-api-lim...

Wow, I had no idea. 1m was enough to work with, but... wow. Thanks for the reference.

Wow. That makes me sad and suspicious. Why would they close themselves to this degree? From 50 million to 10,000!

It is really sad to see one of the biggest Internet platforms and the biggest video platform apply more restrictions. If they opened their data more and made less restrictions, we would be in front of a gold mine of data.

With current restrictions, maybe multiple accounts + VPN are essential for large-scale research.

Hey, I was not able to do the analysis we talked about. The analysis received much interaction after I published it here and was contacted by many people. As a result, I've been too busy. I hope I can do it soon. When I do it, I'll notify you in a comment here. Or provide me with your email.

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