Scrape trending YouTube videos

To scrape trending YouTube videos, you can use several approaches depending on your technical skills and purpose (e.g., real-time display, regular updates, data analysis). Here’s a Python-based method using the YouTube Data API v3 (official and reliable) and another using web scraping with Selenium (less stable due to frequent layout changes on YouTube’s website).

✅ Method 1: Using YouTube Data API v3

Requirements:

• Google Developer Account

• YouTube Data API Key

Steps:

1. Go to Google Cloud Console, create a project.

2. Enable “YouTube Data API v3”.

3. Generate an API key.

Python Script:

python
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import requests

API_KEY = 'YOUR_API_KEY'
REGION_CODE = 'US'  # Use 'IN' for India, 'GB' for UK, etc.
MAX_RESULTS = 10

url = f"https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet,statistics&chart=mostPopular&regionCode={REGION_CODE}&maxResults={MAX_RESULTS}&key={API_KEY}"

response = requests.get(url)
data = response.json()

for video in data['items']:
    title = video['snippet']['title']
    channel = video['snippet']['channelTitle']
    views = video['statistics']['viewCount']
    link = f"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v={video['id']}"
    print(f"Title: {title}nChannel: {channel}nViews: {views}nLink: {link}n")

⚠️ Method 2: Web Scraping with Selenium (Not API-based)

Requirements:

• Python

• Selenium

• Chrome WebDriver

Script Example:

python
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from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import time

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("--headless")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service('path_to_chromedriver'), options=options)

driver.get("https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending")
time.sleep(5)

soup = BeautifulSoup(driver.page_source, 'html.parser')
titles = soup.select("h3 a")

for title in titles[:10]:
    print(f"Title: {title.text.strip()}nLink: https://www.youtube.com{title['href']}n")

driver.quit()

Note: YouTube often changes its layout; web scraping can break without notice.

Would you like help automating this for regular updates or exporting the results to CSV or JSON?