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After pouring over the documentation for YouTube data API v3, I cannot find anything that deals with the new YouTube handles system.

There are several questions on StackOverflow trying to address this topic:

There are a couple of solutions proposed by the community:

  1. The search endpoint using the handle name as the q value
  2. scraping the channel by using requests.get(f"https://youtube.com/@{handle_name}")

The issues I have with these solutions are as follows:

  1. the search endpoint is unreliable (try using it to find https://youtube.com/@illustrator and you'll get an adobe channel) and costs 100 quota where the channel endpoint costs 1.
  2. scraping seems sketchy in terms of the terms of service so I (and those above me) would prefer a more official method.

The support page for YouTube data API V3 https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/support states that Google engineers should be monitoring the StackOverflow questions tagged with youtube-api, youtube-data-api and youtube-v3-api so I'm hoping one of them might see this and give an official answer to the question, even if that answer is that they have no plans in the future to support it.

Mike Whitney
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  • Also, I'm aware of https://yt.lemnoslife.com/channels?handle= but when I included it in the question, it was marked as spam. That one doesn't work since in their code they also scrape for the handle with `$result = getJSONFromHTML("https://www.youtube.com/$handle");` – Mike Whitney Mar 21 '23 at 18:58
  • YouTube staff doesn't answer on Stack Overflow since at least 2 years. You may be luckier on the [YouTube Data API v3 bug tracker](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues?q=youtube%2Fv3%2Fgetting-started). By the way I'm a bit surprised that Stack Overflow detects my domain name https://yt.lemnoslife.com as spam... – Benjamin Loison Mar 21 '23 at 20:46

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