Irmu
Social

YouTube API

Videos, channels, transcripts and comment threads.

Start freeGET https://app.irmu.com/api/crawl15 credits
Why

Why teams scrape YouTube

YouTube holds some of the most commercially useful public data on the web, and almost none of it is available through a stable official feed at the volume real products need. Rate limits, partner-only access and shifting page structures mean teams either give up on the source or maintain a fragile scraper that breaks every few weeks.

The official Data API has a quota model that makes any serious analysis or transcript-based pipeline impractical, and transcripts are not exposed at all.

Irmu removes the infrastructure question entirely. One authenticated request handles proxy selection, browser rendering, anti-bot challenges and retries, and AI Extract turns the resulting page into validated JSON against a schema you define. You get title, channel, views, likes, published_at, description, transcript, comments without writing or maintaining a single selector, and the same endpoint, quota and observability model you already use for every other source.

Use cases

What it powers

  • Transcript mining

    Turn hours of video into searchable text for RAG.

  • Competitor content analysis

    Track topics, cadence and performance.

  • Sentiment analysis

    Extract themes from comment threads.

  • Training corpora

    Build domain-specific spoken-language datasets.

Data

Fields available

Everything below comes back typed and validated against your schema.

title

Video title

channel

Channel name

views

View count

likes

Like count

published_at

Publish date

description

Video description

transcript

Full caption text

comments

Top comments with authors

Request

One call, no selectors

request.sh
curl -G https://app.irmu.com/api/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $IRMU_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" \
  --data-urlencode "premium=true" \
  --data-urlencode "ai_query=Extract title, channel, views, likes, published_at, description as JSON"
Response

Validated JSON

response.json
{
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "domain": "www.youtube.com",
  "premium": true,
  "js": true,
  "ai_query": "Extract title, channel, views, likes, published_at, description as JSON",
  "credits_charged": 15,
  "status": "completed",
  "data": {
    "title": "Building a scraping pipeline",
    "channel": "Dev Diaries",
    "views": 214883
  },
  "error": null
}
SDKs

Copy, paste, ship

import os, requests

res = requests.get(
    "https://app.irmu.com/api/crawl",
    params={
        "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
        "premium": "true",
        "ai_query": "Extract title, channel, views, likes as JSON",
    },
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['IRMU_API_KEY']}"},
)

print(res.json()["data"])
Pricing

Simple credits

Per video page

15 credits

Requests we fail to serve for internal reasons, or to domains we do not cover, are not billed.

See full pricing →
FAQ

YouTube API questions

Related

Often used together

Reddit API

Posts, comments and subreddit activity for research and RAG.

TikTok API

Public videos, creator profiles, sounds and hashtag performance.

Start extracting YouTube data today

200 free credits every month. No card, no sales call.

Start freeRead the docs