YouTube API Quotas

[mattwright324]

Situation

The YouTube API comes with limits for how much it can be used. This application is very heavy on that quota limit depending on what channel(s) or video(s) it is being used for.

When I created this application, the default units per day was set to 1,000,000. As shared in the screenshots below, the limit was automatically reduced several times. However, as of mid-2020 it seems to have been brought back up to 1,000,000 and queries are even lighter now than they were in the past for list actions which make up the majority of this app.

Given my API key were to frequently hit the limit, I could potentially request for an increase but I'm not positive about that working.

Quota Reset

As reported in the Google Developers Console,

Daily quotas reset at midnight Pacific Time (PT).

If you get errors related to the quota being reached, waiting a day should solve your problems.

However, I see this happening more frequently as more people use this application.

Resources

• StackOverflow: YouTube API Limitations
• YouTube Data API Overview #intro, create your own API key
• YouTube Data API Overview #quota
• YouTube Data API (v3) - Quota Calculator
• Developer Policies - Multiple keys

Project Quota History

Edit 11/7/2019; I just received an automated email from YouTube that all of my projects daily quotas had been 'adjusted' and now the default key was reduced and is now sitting at 650,000 instead of 1,000,000.

Edit: 5/9/2020; Around February 2020 more automated emails from YouTube had informed me that the quota had been 'adjusted' again down to 325,000.

Edit 8/5/2020; Fairly recently I got an email notifying me that they updated the quota unit system being lighter and when checking the project is now back to 1 million. This is good news!

Edit 4/13/2021; It seems that my changes in 1.4.5 and 1.4.6 have worked and quota usage has not hit the limit once in the past 30 days!

[DusVen44]

@mattwright324 I just created an app that uses the YouTube API. The limit is 10,000 per day, and only a few searches will exceed that. I've gotten my fetch call super specific (only calling for the thumbnail, title, channel title, and video id), but this still makes my app almost useless before 8:00 am. I'm about to mess with the Bing Search API. It looks like I can make calls to Bings video search, and it should allow my app to run longer. Have you had any progress with your app that uses YouTube's API?

[mattwright324]

@DusVen44 I have not had any progress unfortunately. I tried applying for an increase for one of my other YouTube API projects (youtube geofind) a couple months ago but that didn't work. That project went from 1 million units to 125,000. Around February this project went from 650k down to 325k units.

My YouTube projects are all on a downward trend to unusability like you are describing with your app. At least they have enough to be usable still for the time being. I wish that they had some other model, even paid like their maps api, as I would do that just to make make sure my apps work.

[mattwright324]

The automated reductions in quota have certainly demotivated working on this project if I won't be able to bring the quota back up after it was arbitrarily reduced. The lower it goes, the more unusable this tool becomes.

[mattwright324]

@DusVen44 They recently changed the quota limit system, you should check it out and things may be viable for you now.

I recently received an email with this link where now the standard part parameter quota has been removed. All list operations are 1 unit each regardless of what or how many parts you ask for. My project has also been reset to 1 million units.

[DusVen44]

@mattwright324 Whoa! I’ll check it out tonight. I actually got mine to be useful a couple months ago. I didn’t realize the importance of restricting my API key. I’m a newbie to this stuff. It’s been running perfectly since, but if they’ve made more adjustments, I can ramp up the results to 5 videos again. Thanks for the info!