YouTube Research
Follow shared release-shell rules in:
postplus-sharedrelease-shell rules
Use this skill when the request is about YouTube channels, audience proxies, or public videos.
This skill is for:
- collecting channel metadata and subscriber counts
- collecting audience comment samples from a specific video
- collecting one or more public YouTube video URLs
- discovering a small YouTube video set from a broad query
- normalizing YouTube video metrics into local artifacts
- writing local raw payloads, normalized datasets, and short markdown summaries
This skill is not for:
- LinkedIn collection
- Facebook collection
- TikTok, Instagram, or X workflows
- publishing, deleting, or scheduling posts
- promising a subscriber list that YouTube does not expose publicly
Hosted Capability Boundary
This skill depends on host-managed collection capability for the corresponding collection keys.
In the product shell:
- do not probe or print provider secrets
- do not ask the user to export them inside chat
- if a collection key returns a stable capability/network hard error, stop immediately instead of trying alternate shell commands
Default Collection Keys
Use these hosted collection keys by default:
- channel metadata and subscriber counts
- collection key: youtube-channel-summary - use for channel metadata and subscriber counts - tested input shape: - channels = ["@Google"] - maxVideosPerChannel = 0 - includeChannelInfo = true - includeVideos = false - current observed output fields include: - channelId - channelName - channelHandle - subscriberCount - totalVideos - avatarUrl - bannerUrl
- audience comments collection
- collection key: youtube-comments - use for audience proxy research from comments on a specific video or Shorts URL - tested input shape: - startUrls = ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<video-id>"] - sort - maxItems - current observed output fields include: - id - text - likeCount - replyCount - publishedTime - author
- downloadable video records
- collection key: youtube-video-download - use when the workflow needs the rented downloader-backed record for explicit video URLs
Use comments as an audience proxy when subscriber identities are not public.
Failure Posture
- fail if the request includes non-YouTube platforms
- fail if no YouTube public URLs can be discovered
- fail if hosted content collection returns malformed items without stable URL or id fields
- fail if the channel collection cannot resolve the channel handle or URL
- keep raw responses for debugging
Recommended Workflow
- For channel research, start with
youtube-channel-summary. - For audience research, collect a small comments sample from representative videos with
youtube-comments. - For broad public video discovery, use the hosted content collection scripts below.
Do not present comment authors as a full subscriber list.
Release-Shell Execution Contract
- keep collection briefs, raw datasets, normalized outputs, and summary caches under
<work-folder>/.postplus/youtube-research/ - keep only final user-facing summaries or shortlist exports outside
.postplus/ - compile a small channel, comment, or public-video brief before the expensive collection step
- start with a bounded first pass:
- one channel batch - one comments batch - one public video plan
Public Video Implementation
Read before implementation:
skills/20-research/youtube-research/references/normalized-schema.md
Use these entrypoints:
skills/20-research/youtube-research/scripts/run_youtube_video_collection.mjs
Hosted Collection Note
Use the shared hosted collection runner for actor calls:
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/_postplus_shared/00-core/shared-collection/scripts/collection_actor_run.mjs