How To Use A Youtube Scraper To Collect Data
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Youtube is home to vloggers, dance videos, educational content and lots of useful data. Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from a web page, is the best tool for collecting data from Youtube. Using a Youtube scraper benefits an organization because the data analysis yields valuable insights about video performance, user sentiment, and your channel. This useful data can be combined with data extracted from social media sites in order to be more comprehensive. With our team at Scraping Robot, you can build a custom scraping project to fulfill all your unique data needs.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the automatic extraction of data from a web page. Online data can be extracted manually, but it takes lots of time, money, and labor. With a web scraping tool, you input a URL and receive the web page as output. With the web page transformed into data, it is easily organized and analyzed compared to manual data extraction. While a common HTML scraper works with most web pages, there are specific scraping modules for different sites that are able to recognize the specific kinds of data being extracted and organize it accordingly.
Can I Web Scrape Youtube?
Just like other web pages, you can scrape Youtube. When you learn how to scrape data Youtube, it is important to determine what kind of data you want to extract. For example, If you want to track the success of a video, you would scrape video performance data. If you wanted to know how people responded to your work, then you can scrape the comments section for user sentiment analysis. You can also scrape other popular or relevant Youtube accounts for their channel data (subscribers, views, comments, etc.)
There are free Youtube scrapers available, yet these options are not often sufficient for organizations that analyze large amounts of data and build instead for personal use.
Benefits of Using a Youtube Scraper
Using a Youtube scraper makes it easy, fast, and cheap to extract useful data from Youtube. Whether you’re a small business owner or part of the data department at a large organization, you can experience many benefits from scraping Youtube.
Video performance data
Whether you’re an independent creator or posting informational videos for a brand, it is important to track how well your video does to understand what kinds of videos your audience responds the best to or which do the best overall on Youtube. When you scrape the page for a specific video, you’ll receive the number of views, likes, dislikes, channel subscribers, comments, and more. While each of these metrics can be analyzed individually, it is important to keep the ration of the metrics in mind. For example, a video could have millions of views and have more dislikes than likes. Lots of views is not necessarily indicative of a high quality or well-liked video. Therefore paying attention to the ratio of views to likes/dislikes can be a form of sentiment analysis before looking at the comments.
User sentiment data
The Youtube comment section is full of user sentiment data that reveals different reactions to the video’s content. Before using a Youtube comment scraper, keep in mind that trolls are common in the comment section and therefore extreme negative comments should not be analyzed as legitimate feedback. Thankfully, many loyal fans, casual viewers, and new viewers leave thoughtful comments either in response to or about the video’s content. If you have a cooking channel, then viewers may leave comments about their experience with a recipe or a version for specific dietary needs. In cases like this, the comment section is very useful for understanding how your viewers are engaging with content. In this example, if everyone failed to correctly make a recipe then it is indicative to the creator that their approach isn’t working well.
For professional Youtubers, continually coming up with new topic ideas is difficult. One of the best ways to foster user engagement is to directly ask for viewers to leave their requests in the comments. Then, your comment section essentially becomes a source of data related to fan requests or different types of videos they would like to see. Scraping the comment section makes it easier to make your subscribers happy and provide relevant content.
Channel data
When you scrape the page for a Youtube channel, you’ll get data related to subscribers, amount of videos, playlists, and more. On the about page, you’ll find the total number of views for the channel. While you should scrape the page for your own channel, it is informative and useful to scrape the pages of competing channels because then you get a better sense of how your channels numbers compare to your peers or organizations/brands at the same level of influence. This step is crucial in giving you context for your data to be analyzed within.
After You Web Scrape Youtube
Once you web scrape Youtube, scraping social media sites or creating a custom scraping project with Scraping Robot makes your other extracted data more accurate and useful.
Social media
For Youtube users that are extracting data about their channel popularity, views, and growth, social media sites are great supplemental data that can make your Youtube analysis sharper. Scraping social media mentions can be analyzed for sentiment analysis. This data goes along nicely with scraped Youtube comments because they provide similar feedback. If you want your channel to be popular, it is important to understand what your audience wants to see. Combining social media and Youtube data analysis yields insights that help you understand how your viewers see you and what kinds of videos and content they want to see in the future.
Custom scraping project
While using generic scrapers is accessible and easy for those beginning to extract data, creating a custom scraping project with Scraping Robot is the best way to fulfill your most unique data needs. In addition to working alongside our team to create a proposal for your organization, a custom scraping project allows you to extract the data you need and organize it easily. This helps prepare data for analysis and reduces human error. A custom scraping project is perfect if your organization is extracting large amounts of data or needs it updated frequently. If this sounds good for your organization, check out our process page for more information.
Conclusion
For Youtube creators and organizations running their own accounts, Youtube houses lots of useful data that can be extracted for analysis. A web scraping tool automatically extracts data from a given web page quickly, securely, and affordably. Perfect for organizations of any size, a Youtube scraper makes extracting data related to views, comments, likes/dislikes, and even more reveals lots about the state of your Youtube channel making it easier to make better decisions moving forward.
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