Tutorial: How to Collect Comments from a YouTube video

Before you begin collecting comments from YouTube, you will need to request a Google API key specifically for YouTube. You can find more detailed information regarding this process here.

Note: the standard access to the YouTube API is restricted to 10,000 requests within a 24-hour period, allowing for a maximum of 100,000 comments per day. If you’re an academic researcher, apply to YouTube Research to increase this limit for your project.

Step 1

Go to the “My Datasets” page and click on the “Video Comments” button under “YouTube“.

Step 2

On YouTube, click on the “Share” button under the video you want to collect comments for.

Step 3

Next, copy the last part of the link (=VideoID) as shown in the screenshot below.

Step 4

Return to Communalytic and enter a name for the dataset in the text box labeled “Dataset name”. Next, paste the copied text (VideoID) in the text box labeled as “YouTube Video ID or URL”.

Step 5

After completing the form, click “Start Data Collection”.

Step 6

Once the data collection process begins, you will see the message “Collecting…” next to the new dataset under the “My Datasets” section. Click the “Click to check progress” button to check progress.

Step 7

Once the data collection is complete, click on the name of the dataset to access, analyze or download the dataset.