summary-tin-rovic-youtube-scraper-n8n

How To Scrape YouTube For FREE with N8N

Source: YouTube — Tin Rovic, published 2025-04-16 Tools covered: n8n, YouTube Data API v3

Summary

Tin Rovic walks through a free n8n workflow that uses YouTube Data API v3 (10K-units/day free quota) to scrape channel data — title, channel ID, description, publish date — for any search query, then writes the structured rows to Google Sheets. Pure HTTP-Request + Code node + Sheets-append pattern; no scraping of HTML, no rate-limit gymnastics, no paid API. Useful starter pattern for anyone building a creator-research or competitive-intelligence n8n flow.

The pipeline

1. HTTP Request node → youtube/v3/search with part=snippet&type=channel&q=<term>&maxResults=50&key=<API_KEY>
2. Code node → extract channel_name, channel_id, description, published_at from each item
3. Google Sheets node → append rows

Quota math

• Free quota: 10,000 units/day
• Each search call costs ~100 units
• Practical ceiling: ~100 searches/day per API key, returning up to 50 channels each = ~5,000 channels/day for free

Why it matters

This is the cheapest possible “scrape YouTube” recipe in the wiki, and it’s a foundational pattern for several downstream automations:

• Creator-research for AI automation agency outreach
• Building target lists for content-repurposing pipelines (cf. summary-tin-rovic-youtube-seo-blog)
• Feeding the longform-video-generation pipelines from this batch with reference channels

See Also

• n8n
• AI Automation Workflows
• Tin Rovic
• Tin Rovic’s YouTube → SEO blog pipeline — natural downstream use