YouTube Comments API examples for SocQ

Collect publicly visible YouTube comments from video URLs with normalized text, authors, likes, reply counts, video references, and parent-comment context.

Try YouTube Comments API · Get an API key · Documentation · All SocQ examples

Use cases

• Audience feedback analysis: Analyze public comment text to identify sentiment, recurring questions, themes, and content ideas.
• Campaign and event monitoring: Track public reactions to creators, product launches, campaigns, announcements, or events.
• Discussion research: Use likes, reply counts, and parent comment references to study highly engaged comments and active threads.
• Text analysis datasets: Provide normalized comments to classification, clustering, summarization, moderation-assistance, or alerting workflows.

API behavior

• Submit one or more public video URLs.
• results_limit defaults to 100 per video URL.
• sort_by accepts newest or relevance; newest is the default.
• Videos with disabled, filtered, restricted, or fewer public comments can return fewer records or no records.

All requests use the shared asynchronous flow:

submit -> task_id -> poll task -> read every cursor page -> save results

Quick start

cp .env.example .env
export SOCQ_API_KEY="your-api-key"

Run the complete Node.js workflow:

cd node
npm start

Run the complete Python workflow:

python3 -m pip install -r python/requirements.txt
python3 python/main.py

Both examples load payload.example.json, retry transient API responses, wait for task completion, read every cursor page, and save a paginated public-comment dataset ordered for audience research to output/results.json.

Never expose SOCQ_API_KEY in browser code, mobile apps, public repositories, screenshots, fixtures, or logs.

Request

POST https://api.socq.ai/v1/youtube/comments
Authorization: Bearer <SOCQ_API_KEY>
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"
  ],
  "results_limit": 100,
  "sort_by": "newest"
}

The submit response contains data.task_id. Poll the task endpoint until data.status becomes succeeded or failed, then continue with data.results.next_cursor while data.results.has_more is true.

Complete workflow example

The Node.js and Python programs implement the production-shaped happy path:

1. Load and validate configuration.
2. Submit the endpoint-specific payload.
3. Retry rate-pressure and transient server responses with bounded backoff.
4. Poll the asynchronous task with a ten-minute application timeout.
5. Stop cleanly on a failed task and surface the public error message.
6. Read all cursor pages instead of silently returning only the first page.
7. Write a stable JSON artifact containing task metadata and normalized records.

Use the synthetic files in fixtures/ for tests and documentation. They do not contain customer, account, or production data.

Production notes

See docs/production-notes.md for validation, retry, timeout, pagination, deduplication, logging, and endpoint-specific guidance.

Responsible use and platform scope

• Use only publicly accessible YouTube channels, videos, Shorts, comments, transcripts, and fields supported by the selected endpoint.
• Do not use the examples to access private videos, restricted content, unavailable transcripts, or authentication controls.
• SocQ is not an official API of the represented social platform and is not affiliated with or endorsed by that platform.
• Before production use, assess the laws, platform terms, privacy obligations, and retention requirements that apply to your organization and use case.
• Collect only the fields needed for a defined purpose, restrict access, set retention periods, and support correction or deletion workflows where required.
• Platform names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.

This section describes the public-data boundary; it is not legal advice or a guarantee that every use case is permitted in every jurisdiction.

Repository contents

Path	Purpose
curl/request.md	Copy-paste submit, poll, and pagination requests
node/index.mjs	Complete Node.js workflow
python/main.py	Complete Python workflow
payload.example.json	Safe endpoint-specific request body
fixtures/	Synthetic submit and task response shapes
docs/production-notes.md	Production integration guidance