Question

I want to perform search queries using Youtube API v3.
What I need is to retrieve video ids and statistics for each video.
From the docs I can see that statistics is not returned for video items. If I try to ask for statistics using this query:

https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?type=video&part=snippet,statistics&q=kittens&key={MY_KEY}

I receive an error:

{
 "error": {
  "errors": [
   {
    "domain": "youtube.part",
    "reason": "unknownPart",
    "message": "statistics",
    "locationType": "parameter",
    "location": "part"
   }
  ],
  "code": 400,
  "message": "statistics"
 }
}

So I guess that I need to make two requests:

1. Perform actual search and retrieve list of video ids.
2. Make API request https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos/list to retrieve statistics for each video.

Or maybe I’m missing something and there’s a way to get statistics for videos within one search query?

Answer 1

In the guide, they specify “the part names that you can include in the parameter value are id and snippet” when using https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search. (statistics is not an accepted value).

So I think that you have to make two requests as you say, at least that is what I’m doing. I couldn’t find any other solution. I would be interested to know if there was a workaround…