I mapped a YouTube channel's entire catalog in two runs — for under a cent

Competitor research on YouTube typically ends after either manually viewing forty videos or attempting to write a scraper, often failing after the third rate limit. To obtain a channel's full catalog, I utilized two existing tools sequentially, which took less than a minute and cost under a cent. Here's the process:

Step 1: Enumerate the catalog quickly and inexpensively. Running the first tool with a 30-video cap for @OpenAI took about 7 seconds and returned 30 rows. The output included videoId, title, URL, channel name, and channel ID, but excluded view counts, durations, and publish dates. This separation of tasks allows for a nearly free enumeration pass, enabling affordable enumeration on multiple competitors.

Step 2: Enrich only the necessary information. From the 30 rows, I input three video URLs into the companion details tool. This step revealed view counts, durations, and likes. For instance, "Cyber at the Frontier: Introducing Daybreak Red Team & Daybreak Defense Factory" had 51,193 views, a 34-minute duration, and 70 likes. The enrichment process encountered gaps, such as a row lacking like counts, as public pages might not consistently provide all metrics.

The two-step approach is beneficial because enriching during enumeration would cost more for a large channel. Instead, enumerating all videos is inexpensive, giving a full topic map of published content, frequency, and titles. This allows for local sorting and filtering based on keywords, series, or recency, followed by enriching the shortlisted rows with per-video costs.

This pattern can be applied to other platforms like TikTok or search results. The cost-effective strategy also applies to evaluating any data tool by assessing enumeration pass costs before considering detail pass returns.

Both tools are accessible as Apify actors, requiring no coding. By inputting a channel handle and setting a cap, the channel catalog can be downloaded as JSON or CSV using https://apify.com/bin_ai_tools/youtube-channel-videos. Video details can be accessed via https://apify.com/bin_ai_tools/youtube-video-details. Automating these steps through the Apify API provides a straightforward integration into scripts or scheduled jobs, such as a weekly competitor-catalog comparison, which can be achieved in about twenty lines of code.