Scrape & Export Video Data from YouTube Free
Now you are ready to optimize YouTube’s YouTube channel for your clients or to see what YouTube rivals are doing with their videos. YouTube makes exporting and scraping video information difficult. HTML3_
YouTube is too large to crawl like a site. We encountered this problem when optimizing titles and tags for bulk-video mapping.
This shows how to export and extract video information from YouTube.
1. Get your Setup Ready
You will require:
Chrome (free), to extract video URLs.
Google Sheets (free), for organizing data.
Screaming Frog (free 500 URLs) to crawl videos.
2 You can load all your YouTube videos
Continue loading videos until they are gone.
*Some users reported that YouTube blocks scraping from their main apps.
3. Copy and paste the YouTube videos
Right-click on any video link to click on Scrape similar.
Double-check that it successfully scraped all videos. Next, export to Google Docs.
4. Save URLs and Clean Up
In your Google Doc, add https://www.youtube.com to all the URLs
Remove any unneeded parameters, e.g. &list).
5. Screaming Frog can take your list.
Paste the URL list in TextEdit (Macintosh), or Notepad (Windows). Save the file as “a.txt”
Now, open Screaming Frog. Set it to List Mode. Next, crawl.
6. You can re-insert it into a spreadsheet
Export your Screaming Frog crawl information to a.csv or.xlsx. Then, move the data into Microsoft Excel or back to Google Sheets.
7. Get the data!
Your primary focus should be on the Title and Meta Keywords columns. YouTube uses your video tags as a quality signal.
SEOs often don’t understand YouTube video tag information in the unusable meta keywords field.
Google does not use meta keywords tags for website relevancy. The meta keyword field stores the tags.
This data can also be used to evaluate meta descriptions, word count at scale, and spot optimization opportunities.
Bonus!
Screaming Frog offers a Custom Extract function. If you can find its Xpath, you can easily extract any HTML element from YouTube pages.
To see the number of YouTube views that your videos have received, click on Inspect Element, Copy Xpath, and then click on
Copy and paste the Xpath in the Custom Extraction section of Screaming Frog.
You might need to play with your User Agent to prevent it from being blocked. This is useful for quick analysis.
2nd Notice: You might need to change the Spider’s Rendering settings to “Javascript” instead of “Text Only” since YouTube loads many page assets dynamically.
Next Steps and Other Thoughts
Use Scraper Chrome and Screaming Frog for YouTube data collection. To quickly change meta information, you can use YouTube bulk edit.
Every YouTube video contains a Meta Keywords field. Make sure you monitor your competitor’s YouTube videos and take their information.
