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This video has "X" views

A YouTube bot that will update the video title to match the view count

screenshot

This code was inspired by a Tweet by Tom Scott that referenced a YouTube video who’s title seemed to automagically match the view count. This is a Node.js example of how to do this.

Here’s the original YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0

And here’s my copy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17uGdxLtas0

For now, my script is running as a cron job ervery 10 minutes (in order to stay under the 10,000 "units" per day limit).

Project Setup

Clone the repo locally

git clone https://github.com/stursby/this-video-has-x-views.git && cd this-video-has-x-views

Install the dependencies (via Yarn, or npm)

yarn
# npm install

Setup YouTube API

A lof of the code is copied over from https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/quickstart/nodejs

1. Log into the Google Developers Console:

https://console.developers.google.com/

2. Create New Project

On the right side you should see a button to create a new project.

I'll name mine "This video has x views"

Next, click "Create".

3. Enable the YouTube Data API v3

Click the "Enable APIs and Services" button

Search for "YouTube" and then enable the "YouTube Data API v3"

4. Generate Credentials

Click the "Create Credentails" button and the select the following:

Which API are you using?

  • YouTube Data API v3

Where will you be calling the API from?

  • Other UI (eg: Windows, CLI tool)

What data will you be accessing?

  • User data

5. Set up consent screen

Select "External" for the User Type

Fill out your Application Name, then hit "Save" at the very bottom

Rename the file client_id.json

Run the bot

node bot.js

If this is the first time running the bot, it you'll be prompted in the CLI to visit a Google URL which walks you through the OAuth flow.

Once you accept all the app permissions, you'll be give a code. Enter that back into your CLI.

If successful, your video title was just updated!

Cron job

To automatically run the bot, you can setup a cron job that calls the script.

On mac, to test locally, you can run the following:

crontab -e

Next you'll need to enter your task (I use https://crontab.guru/ for complex sytax). For example, let’s run the bot every 10 minutes:

*/10 * * * *   node /some/full/path/to/project/bot.js &> /dev/null

Let’s break down those 3 parts:

  1. The frequency to run the bot (every 10 minutes)

  2. Tell node to execute the bot.js file include the full system path

  3. The &> /dev/null part just tells the system not to ouput the console message

YouTube API limits

By defauly, YouTube gives you 10,000 "units" per day on the API.

You can also calcualte your API costs here.

So for our purposes, the two API calls are:

  1. videos.list.statistics = 3 units

  2. videos.update.snippet = 53 units

For a total of 56 units per invocation.

So, if I have a bucket of 10,000 per day, and it costs 56 units each time, I can run it ~178 times per day.

With 1440 minutes in a day divided by 178, we can safely run the bot about every 8 miutes. We'll round up to 10 to be safe!