YouTube Trending Tracker

Track YouTube trending videos by country and category. Returns title, channel, view count, like count, comment count, duration, tags, and thumbnail URL. Monitor viral content, track emerging creators, and analyze trending topics using the official YouTube Data API v3 free tier.

Features

• Fetch trending videos for one or more countries in a single run
• Filter by YouTube category (Music, Gaming, Entertainment, Science & Tech, etc.)
• Returns rich metadata: views, likes, comments, duration, tags, thumbnail, engagement rate
• No API key required — falls back to YouTube's public RSS feed automatically
• Engagement rate computed as (likes + comments) / views

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
apiKey	string	—	YouTube Data API v3 key (optional). Without it, uses public RSS (limited data).
countries	array	["US"]	ISO 2-letter country codes, e.g. ["US", "GB", "KR", "JP"]
maxResults	integer	25	Max trending videos per country (1–50)
categoryId	string	"0"	YouTube category ID. 0 = All. See category table below.

YouTube Category IDs

ID	Category
0	All
10	Music
20	Gaming
22	People & Blogs
23	Comedy
24	Entertainment
25	News & Politics
26	Howto & Style
28	Science & Technology

Getting a YouTube Data API v3 Key (Free)

1. Go to Google Cloud Console
2. Create a project → Enable "YouTube Data API v3"
3. Credentials → Create API Key
4. Free tier: 10,000 units/day (each trending request costs ~1 unit per video)

Without an API key, the actor falls back to YouTube's public RSS feed, which returns the global trending list without country filtering and with limited fields (no view/like/comment counts).

Output

Each record represents one trending video:

{
  "rank": 1,
  "country": "US",
  "video_id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Video Title",
  "channel": "Channel Name",
  "published_at": "2026-09-01T12:00:00Z",
  "view_count": 5000000,
  "like_count": 250000,
  "comment_count": 12000,
  "duration_seconds": 212,
  "duration_iso": "PT3M32S",
  "category_id": "10",
  "tags": ["music", "pop"],
  "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "video_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "engagement_rate": 0.0524,
  "fetched_at": "2026-09-02T10:00:00Z",
  "data_source": "api"
}

Fields are null in RSS fallback mode (no API key) for view_count, like_count, comment_count, duration_seconds, duration_iso, category_id, and tags.

Pricing

$0.005 per video (Pay-Per-Event). Fetching 25 videos for 4 countries = 100 videos = $0.50.

Example Usage

Fetch US + Korea trending, top 25 each

{
  "countries": ["US", "KR"],
  "maxResults": 25,
  "categoryId": "0"
}

Fetch gaming trending across multiple markets

{
  "apiKey": "YOUR_API_KEY",
  "countries": ["US", "GB", "JP", "BR"],
  "maxResults": 50,
  "categoryId": "20"
}

Quick test without API key (RSS fallback)

{
  "countries": ["US"],
  "maxResults": 25
}

Use Cases

• Viral content monitoring — track what's trending before it peaks
• Creator research — discover emerging channels before they explode
• Market intelligence — correlate trending topics with brand mentions
• Content strategy — identify trending categories and themes by country
• Ad placement research — find high-engagement trending content

Notes

• The YouTube Data API v3 free quota is 10,000 units/day. Each country fetch uses ~1 unit per video retrieved.
• RSS fallback is global (does not support country-specific trending).
• engagement_rate = (like_count + comment_count) / view_count — null counts treated as 0.

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Related actors

• YouTube Channel Stats — Deep channel analytics for creators you discover in trending data
• Reddit Subreddit Tracker — Reddit community discussion to cross-reference with YouTube trending topics
• Tech News Aggregator — News coverage that often follows viral YouTube tech videos

Feedback

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