# YouTube video statistics: views, likes and metadata by video id

Views, likes, comment count, duration, title, description, tags and publish date, for any public video. 5 providers do this through one treg.to key, and one of them is Google's own API on the account you already have, which is free but rationed.

## What's the best way to ask ChatGPT?

Setup line (paste into any agent): `set up treg — https://treg.to/llms.txt`

Then ask: "Using treg, get the view count, like count and publish date for these 30 YouTube video ids and put them in a table sorted by views. Show me the price first."

- **Give it video ids** The v= parameter of the watch URL. Most providers take the id, not the URL.
- **Ask for a batch** Google's API takes 50 ids in one call for the price of one.
- **Name the fields you want** Views, likes and duration live in different parts of the response.
- **Say which account to use** Your own Google connection is free; the paid providers need no account.

## Why go through treg.to

- **One key, not 9 accounts** treg.to holds the provider keys. Neither you nor the agent sees them.
- **Price before the call** The provider's own rate, $0.000 markup, from a prepaid balance.
- **No subscription, no seats** Charged per call. $1.00 free per new team, no card to start.
- **Your own keys are free** Already pay Hunter? Register it and those calls are never metered.
- **Switch by changing a word** Another provider is a different word in the prompt, not a new integration.
- **Nothing to integrate** No SDK, no OAuth dance per vendor, no seats.

## Behind the scenes: what ChatGPT sees before it calls

treg.to does not choose for you. It hands ChatGPT this comparison and it picks, or you tell it how.

### Which YouTube video stats API is cheapest?

- Cheapest per result: Bright Data at $0.0015 (`brightdata.x.youtube-videos`)
- Cheapest per found: TikHub at $0.001 (`tikhub.x.youtube-web-v2-get-video-info`)
- Cheapest per call: ScrapeCreators at $0.00188 (`scrapecreators.youtube.video.detail`)

Those units are not interchangeable: one call can return many results, so compare on the unit you will actually be billed in.

### Which one is the most reliable?

- ScrapeCreators: 100% over 80 calls, 1.6s median
- TikHub: 100% over 40 calls, 2.1s median

Measured on treg.to traffic; not a controlled benchmark.

### How do the providers compare?

| Provider | Price | Accepts | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| TikHub | $0.001 per found | video_id, language_code, need_format, video_url | 2026-07-28 |
| Bright Data | $0.0015 per result | dataset_id, format, input | unverified |
| ScrapeCreators | $0.00188 per call | url | 2026-07-28 |
| Just One API | $0.0148 per found | videoId | 2026-07-28 |
| YouTube | own account, free | part, id | 2026-07-28 |

Endpoints:

- `brightdata.x.youtube-videos`: treg call brightdata.x.youtube-videos
- `justoneapi.youtube.video.detail`: treg call justoneapi.youtube.video.detail --query videoId=jNQXAC9IVRw
- `scrapecreators.youtube.video.detail`: treg call scrapecreators.youtube.video.detail --query url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
- `tikhub.x.youtube-web-v2-get-video-info`: treg call tikhub.x.youtube-web-v2-get-video-info --query video_id=oaSNBz4qMQY --query language_code=zh-CN
- `tikhub.x.youtube-web-v2-get-video-info-v2`: treg call tikhub.x.youtube-web-v2-get-video-info-v2 --query video_id=dQw4w9WgXcQ --query video_url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
- `tikhub.youtube.video.detail`: treg call tikhub.youtube.video.detail --query video_id=dQw4w9WgXcQ
- `youtube.youtube.video.detail`: treg call youtube.youtube.video.detail --query part=snippet,statistics --query id=dQw4w9WgXcQ

## What people actually struggle with

Almost nobody complains about the price of this call. They complain about the daily cap, and about whether the number they got is today's number. From ~180 Reddit and X posts in August 2026, with the vendor clusters excluded, these five recur.

**The free quota runs out in the middle of something**

> "i exceeded youtubes API quota. womp womp. Anyway, it should be back and updating properly at midnight pacific time." (r/Destiny, 575 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1vafc5k/dave_comment_tracker_i_made/)

What this page can do about it: The daily budget resets at midnight Pacific, so a bug in the morning costs the rest of the day. Reading a video costs 1 unit of 10,000 and batches 50 ids into that one unit, so most people who hit the wall were spending it on search. The paid rows have no daily ceiling; treg.to shows you both and you pick, it does not switch over on its own.

**You cannot tell whether you ran out or something else broke**

> "The strange thing is, my daily usage counter (which I'm tracking in the script) shows that I'm nowhere near the daily quota limit." (r/pythontips, 2 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/pythontips/comments/1epf9dk/youtube_api_quota_issue_despite_not_reaching_the/)

What this page can do about it: The recurring complaint is not running out, it is not knowing why. We cannot fix Google's quota accounting. What a metered call gives you instead is a definite price before it goes and a definite outcome after, so the ambiguous middle disappears.

**Leaving your laptop changes the failure mode**

> "Apparently that IP address is for AWS." (r/MailChimp, 6 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/MailChimp/comments/1g9ft0z/youtube_api_error/)

What this page can do about it: The error underneath that thread is API_KEY_IP_ADDRESS_BLOCKED, and it is the same story as the transcript job: it worked until it was deployed. A call through treg.to leaves the provider's infrastructure, not your host's. Whether your own host is blocked is a property of your host, and no comparison table has that column.

**The counts themselves are not stable at fine granularity**

> "during certain intervals, views increase without likes/comments scaling proportionally, while at the hourly aggregate level everything looks perfectly normal" (r/HiddenTrueCrimeChat, 23 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/HiddenTrueCrimeChat/comments/1prow46/ive_been_logging_htc_youtube_views_likes_and/)

What this page can do about it: This is the honest limit of every row on this page. View counts are aggregated and sometimes revised downward by YouTube itself, and every provider here is downstream of that. A table can compare price and measured success rate; it cannot tell you whose number is right, because on some hours no number is.

**The folk remedy is more keys, which is not a plan**

> "Google youtube API has a quota limits, so I added over 45 API" (r/MetaRayBanDisplay, 4 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/MetaRayBanDisplay/comments/1tyuxrx/viewtube_v20_question_for_all_google_youtube_api/)

What this page can do about it: Forty-five keys is a lot of Google projects to own, and it is the shape people reach for when the only lever is a daily cap. The alternative here is a per-call price with no cap and no rotation to maintain. Spend the free quota first if you have it.


## What actually differs

- Google's Data API charges 1 quota unit whether you pass one video id or fifty, out of a default 10,000 units a day. Batching is not an optimisation here, it is a fifty-fold difference in what a day's quota buys you.
- The billing units are not comparable. Bright Data bills per record delivered, TikHub and Just One API bill per successful call, ScrapeCreators bills the call whether or not it found the video. A run over a list with dead ids costs differently on each.
- Like counts are returned as the channel chose to expose them, and a channel that hides its like count returns no field rather than a zero. Treat a missing field and a zero as different answers when you aggregate.

## What does a YouTube video stats API return?

One video's public record: the snippet (title, description, tags, channel, publish date), the statistics (view count, like count, comment count) and the content details (duration, definition, caption availability). It is the same data the watch page shows, as JSON. Watch time, impressions, click-through rate and audience retention are not here; those are YouTube Analytics, and only the channel owner can read them.

## Questions

**Is the YouTube Data API free?** Yes, on your own Google account, and treg.to never meters a call on your own key. What it is not is unlimited: 10,000 quota units a day by default, which this method spends 1 at a time. The paid providers exist for when that runs out.

**Can I get watch time or retention?** No. Those are YouTube Analytics numbers and only the channel's owner can read them, through a connected account. Everything on this page is the public record of the video.

**Do I need a Google account for this?** Only for the free row. The other providers are called on treg.to's keys and billed per call from your prepaid balance, so you can read a video's stats with no Google project at all.

**How current are the view counts?** They are what the platform is publishing at the moment of the call. YouTube itself updates public view counts on its own schedule, so two providers reading a minute apart can legitimately disagree on a fast-moving video.

HTML version: https://treg.to/use-cases/youtube-video/video-details-views-and-stats