Not possible/Seek alternatives

:seedling:

YouTube

Watched videos: amount, time used, channels

Unfortunately the YouTube API no longer provides information about your time spent watching videos, so this isn’t possible. You’ll need to use something like RescueTime to track your time spent here instead.

309 votes

Tagged as Integration

Suggested 05 May 2017 by user Tuuli Kähkönen

Moved into Not possible/Seek alternatives 25 November 2022

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  • 05 May 2017 Tuuli Kähkönen created this task

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    YouTube has an API, so this should be possible, though I haven’t looked into how much it tells us about what you’ve watched, etc.

    06 May 2017
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    Through Rescuetime we could already track time spent on YouTube so this seems only to be valuable if there is other data that can be extracted from there as well.

    20 August 2017
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    I’d be interested in tracking how I frequent specifically named YouTube channels or videos that match certain text search queries.

    19 October 2017
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    Would love this. I use RescueTime which does log time on YouTube, but my time spent on YouTube is not always unproductive (just mostly…). To me there’s a good difference between jumping down the rabbit hole OK Go music videos vs watching an hour long developer conference talk.

    I played around with the Google api explorer, and unfortunately it appears that getting a user’s watch history was (deprecated on Sept 12, 2016)[https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/revision_history#august-11-2016]. You can still get a user’s likes, and videos in their playlists (excluding watch history and Watch Later), and their subscriptions but I don’t think that’s very valuable for tracking activity.

    This integration won’t likely be possible.

    24 April 2018
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    And we’ll just pretend I formatted that correctly because I don’t know how to edit my comments

    24 April 2018
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    If one is a YouTube content creator, number of views, likes, dislikes, comments, and # of times ads appeared during your own videos would be nice.

    07 August 2019
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    I don’t think RescueTime data is useful if you have other devices that can access YT but don’t have RescueTime installed.

    25 July 2021
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    I watch youtube on my iPad. Rescuetime is not available

    16 April 2022
  • 25 November 2022 Josh Sharp moved this task into Not possible/Seek alternatives

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    Looks like you can do it via Google Takeout. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63213016/how-can-i-get-my-watch-history-with-youtube-data-api-v3 Maybe add an api that consumes google takeout zip files?

    07 September 2023