youtube-research

YouTube Research

Use this skill for public YouTube channel summaries, audience comment samples, downloadable video records, and public video metrics through PostPlus hosted collection.

Apply shared rulebook and user-guidance rules from postplus-shared.

Before Collection Boundary

The released collection does not expose subscriber identities. Use channel metadata and comments as public proxies, and do not present comment authors as the subscriber base.

Collection Route

YouTube research runs through two hosted routes:

• Public video search/retrieval scrapes the public-video source. The --request file is a JSON array of input records (one record per channel handle or video URL).
• Channel summary, audience comments, and downloadable video records collect a hosted collection. The --request file is the collection input object directly.

<!-- BEGIN GENERATED EXECUTION EXAMPLE -->

postplus research scrape youtube-videos --request request.json --output result.json

postplus research collect youtube-channel-summary --request request.json --output result.json

<!-- END GENERATED EXECUTION EXAMPLE -->

Default Workflow

1. For channel research, collect a channel summary.
2. For audience research, collect a small comments sample.
3. For broad public video discovery, compile a small public-video plan and scrape the public-video source.
4. If a hosted run is pending, preserve collection-report.json and resume with the emitted poll command.
5. Keep observation separate from inference, especially for audience claims.

Result record shapes for every collection and source key are documented in the postplus-shared reference dataset-item-schemas.md; consult it before writing result-processing code, and probe a single record only to verify.

While collection is pending, tell the user the public collection is running from a saved checkpoint and continue independent brief or source-review work.

Output

Return channel metadata, public video records, comment-sample findings, source URLs, metric fields that were present, and clear notes about unavailable subscriber identities.

Failure Modes

• Stop if the request includes non-YouTube platforms.
• Stop if no public YouTube URL, channel, or query can be used.
• Stop if hosted collection cannot resolve the channel handle or URL.
• Stop on hosted capability, auth, DNS, proxy, network, or malformed-output hard errors.
• Do not promise private audience identities or logged-in analytics.

Handoff

Benchmark findings can feed benchmark-to-brief, video-analysis, or broader cross-platform synthesis.

Public Command Boundary

• Choose the smallest matching command or workflow from the user input and run it directly.
• Readiness diagnostics: postplus doctor --skill youtube-research.
• If an owned CLI or script command fails, report the exact error and stop. Do not bypass the failure with metadata-only answers, readiness probing, local payload rewrites, fallback providers, or unpublished tools.
• Use postplus research schema --json only when constructing or repairing an unknown request shape.
• Public video scrape: postplus research scrape youtube-videos --request <input-array.json> --output <result.json> (request = a JSON array of input records).
• Hosted collection: postplus research collect <collectionKey> --request <input.json> --output <result.json> (input = the collection parameters; channel summary, comments, or video download).
• Resume a pending public video scrape: postplus research scrape --run-handle <runHandle> --output <result.json> (waits in-command up to 45s per invocation; rerun while pending).
• Resume a pending hosted collection: postplus research collect --run-handle <runHandle> --output <result.json> (waits in-command up to 45s per invocation; rerun while pending).
• Keep the first pass bounded; expand only after inspecting the first result.
• If the CLI returns a quote-confirmation challenge, run postplus quote confirm --json --challenge-file <challenge.json> and retry with the returned token.