I am creating a networking app for musicians. I was wanting to use the Youtube Data API to let users connect their Youtube channel to their profile within my app. I got everything in place and working via making requests to URLs similar to https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels?part=snippet,statistics&forUsername=PewDiePie&key=[YOUR_API_KEY]. This works great and returns this JSON:
{ "kind": "youtube#channelListResponse", "etag": "\"p4VTdlkQv3HQeTEaXgvLePAydmU/bj_rirVFbrVoTIOa6lCGdaXaG5M\"", "pageInfo": { "totalResults": 1, "resultsPerPage": 5 }, "items": [ { "kind": "youtube#channel", "etag": "\"p4VTdlkQv3HQeTEaXgvLePAydmU/Blp06js4r7j93y1EfKve84oXWpo\"", "id": "UC-lHJZR3Gqxm24_Vd_AJ5Yw", "snippet": { "title": "PewDiePie", "description": "I make videos.", "publishedAt": "2010-04-29T10:54:00.000Z", "thumbnails": { "default": { "url": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/a/AGF-l79FVckie4j9WT-4cEW6iu3gPd4GivQf_XNSWg=s88-c-k-c0xffffffff-no-rj-mo", "width": 88, "height": 88 }, "medium": { "url": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/a/AGF-l79FVckie4j9WT-4cEW6iu3gPd4GivQf_XNSWg=s240-c-k-c0xffffffff-no-rj-mo", "width": 240, "height": 240 }, "high": { "url": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/a/AGF-l79FVckie4j9WT-4cEW6iu3gPd4GivQf_XNSWg=s800-c-k-c0xffffffff-no-rj-mo", "width": 800, "height": 800 } }, "localized": { "title": "PewDiePie", "description": "I make videos." }, "country": "US" }, "statistics": { "viewCount": "24334379402", "commentCount": "0", "subscriberCount": "102000000", "hiddenSubscriberCount": false, "videoCount": "4054" } } ] }
Most of my app's users will be smaller musicians, likely with less than 10k youtube subscribers. Take my sister for example, this is a link to her youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe4Eogv2uGaKUe4x3VNrwsg.
Whenever trying to search for her Youtube channel with the API via https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels?part=snippet,statistics&forUsername=Audrey_Chopin&key=[YOUR_API_KEY] (and variations such as replacing Audrey_Chopin with Audrey%20Chopin or Audrey+Chopin) yield no results: { "kind": "youtube#channelListResponse", "etag": "\"p4VTdlkQv3HQeTEaXgvLePAydmU/zJL80hJ0IwMo5wddECFapC8I6Q4\"", "pageInfo": { "totalResults": 0, "resultsPerPage": 5 }, "items": [] }.
Are smaller users not supposed to be returned from this endpoint? If so, is there any way I can implement users to search for their profile without forcing the user to do the OAuth process, i.e. signing into their Youtube account?
It seems that using the /search endpoint works better for smaller channels, though there is less information available in this endpoint (I am unable to get subscriber count and video count, which was included in the "statistics" part of the /channel endpoint).
So updating
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels?part=snippet,statistics&forUsername=Audrey_Chopin&key=[YOUR_API_KEY]
to
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=snippet&channelType=any&maxResults=50&order=relevance&q=Audrey%20Chopin&type=channel&key=[YOUR_API_KEY]
yielded smaller channels, though without as much data as when using the /channel endpoint.
Still curious, if anybody knows, why the /channel endpoint does not return smaller channels.