For some reason I was back in Chrome today, and I searched Google, without meaning to, for:

get channel id for a youtube channel

Here’s what I got:

✨ AI Overview Learn more … To find a YouTube channel’s ID, you can: Use the YouTube account settings Sign in to YouTube, select your profile picture, then Settings, and then Advanced settings. You must be signed in as the channel’s primary owner to see this information.

That’s great, but I am not the channel’s primary owner, and surely the majority of the time the person seeking an answer to this question will not be, also.

Use the channel’s URL Click on the channel’s name under any of its videos, and then look at the URL of that page. The handle will appear at the end of the link, preceded by the @ sign.

?

That is not the channel ID.

Use the page source code View the page source code of any video from the channel, and look for the “channelid” keyword.

I felt a little stingy at this point, because this sounds like a real solution.

I opened the source for the channel page, and searched the source code for channelid, and found nothing.

Then, while typing this complaint, I noticed that I was supposed to do that from a random video’s page, so I opened one of the videos, did that, and found nothing.

A YouTube channel can have multiple URLs that direct viewers to the channel homepage. These URLs can look different, but they all point to the same channel.

Irrelevant information. How do I find the channel ID?

Generative AI is experimental. 👍 👎

Thanks Google! I know.

Sign in to YouTube. Settings . From the left menu, select Advanced settings. You’ll see your channel’s user and channel IDs.

Find your YouTube user & channel IDs - Google Help

Yes! I know. However, this isn’t my channel. I want to find someone else’s channel’s ID.

❓About featured snippets • 💬 Feedback

I have some doubts whether you would accept my feedback, if I decided to give it. Why is this here?

Learn what words mean as you search Select words to get definitions & translations without leaving the page (Got it)

Thanks! That’s really useful to know. Do you know how I can get a channel ID though?

People also ask

  • How do I get a YouTube Content ID?
  • Does YouTube have the ID channel?
  • How do I get my YouTube channel name?
  • How to find YouTube channel gmail id?

Fascinating!

Stack Overflow https://stackoverflow.com › questions › how-can-i-get-a… An easy answer is, your YouTube Channel ID is UC + {YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID}. To be sure of your YouTube Channel ID or your YouTube account ID, access the advanced … 23 answers Top answer: To obtain the channel id you can view the source code of the channel page and find … How can I get YouTube channel ID using channel name URL? Feb 7, 2023 Is there any way to get youtube channel ID … - Stack Overflow Sep 14, 2023 How to get a youtube channelid from the channels link … Jan 11, 2023 I can’t get channel id using YouTube Data API v3 Mar 25, 2023 More results from stackoverflow.com

I clicked on Stack Overflow, closed several popups. The top answer wasn’t useful. I did find a couple of answers down:

"To obtain the channel id you can view the source code of the channel page and find either data-channel-external-id=“UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg” or “externalId”:“UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg”.

UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg will be the channel ID you are looking for.

I tried that, and it didn’t work.

Back to Google:

Comment Picker https://commentpicker.com › Tools › YouTube YouTube Channel ID Finder is a free tool to help you find a YouTube channel ID, along with other related channel information and statistics.

And it worked! I get 2 free channel ID queries per day. Fortunately I only needed the one. But it worked! It only took several minutes of scrolling past multiple screens of things that didn’t work.

Now let’s compare that to DDG.

Videos for get channel id for a youtube channel 1:28 How to Find YouTube Channel ID - 2024 263K views YouTube1yr

I skipped this as I didn’t want a video.

https://www.streamweasels.com › tools › youtube-channel-id-and-user-id-convertor YouTube Channel ID Finder - YouTube Username to ID Convertor Simply enter any YouTube username or handle below and click Convert Username to ID. This tools makes use of the YouTube API to make the conversion. You can check out our other API tools here. Select YouTube handle, username or legacy: YouTube handles are now considered the default for Y

And there we go! It works.

When did it get this bad?

  • DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1271·
    3 months ago

    It got bad several years ago, which is when I permanently jumped ship to DDG. It’s nowhere near as good as Google used to be, but on the other hand, it’s also nowhere near as bad as Google is now.

    • WIZARD POPE💫@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      3 months ago

      It especially sucks I still sometimes have to go back to google purely because living in a smal country a lot of stuff yimply cannot be found on ddg.

    • Mr_Blott@feddit.ukEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      I’ve been paying for kagi. It’s shit but I’m giving them a fiver a month in the hope it gets better

      • trainsaresexy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        kagi

        I’ve been trying the trial/100 searches a month. Using very sparingly, but I like how it pulls up actual sites instead of ads disguised as websites. Idk if I’d pay $5 or $10USD to use it though. Bit steep.

        Millionshort is another one, haven’t used them in a while. The results were meh but nice that you can filter out major websites.

        kagi

    • njm1314@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      I find DuckDuckGo works on Broad General topics, but when you’re trying to get specific it is just completely inadequate. I’ll search for something in the results are nowhere close to what I’m looking for. I’ve been trying to find something better.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
    651·
    3 months ago

    The AI overview thing is completely full of shit 99% of the time, too.

    It’s given me fake URLs, made up information about Google’s own services/support methods, fabricated tutorials for video games, and other insane shit.

    Like when I asked if Tsushima was a real place, it just gave a paragraph about the game (Ghost of Tsushima) and said that the game featured real, modern restraunts from Japan such as Narisawa and fast food places like McDonald’s. The game takes place in or close to the feudal period.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    551·
    3 months ago

    About the same time google started personalising search results.

    Then ads in place of search results

    Then Seo spam to get top results of those keyword searches.

      • PlasticExistence@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        3 months ago

        Thank you for that article! He’s a truly good writer, and I read a couple more of his entries before I bookmarked his site.

      • mPony@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        3 months ago

        FTA

        McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is to healthy tissue.

        Holy shit, this writer pulls no punches.

          • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.caEnglish
            21·
            3 months ago

            Great question – Because the process of enshittification requires the subordination of the user’s interests to the interests of businesses (ad buyers, in Google’s case), which in turn will be subordinated to the interests of shareholders. In principle, it should be possible to balance los dos in a pro-consumer, non-cynical way, but in practice, more line go up. Line must go up. Enshittification optimizes for line go up.

            • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
              1·
              3 months ago

              I understand that that’s the general trend of public companies. However, I think that this specific action benefits both.

              • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.caEnglish
                1·
                3 months ago

                In a narrow sense, it’s useful for like… e.g. location-based search…So of you search “cosmetic dentistry,” it’s useful to privilege results closer to you (or at least you could make that argument). But broadly, in practice, “personalization” is primarily optimized for the ad buyer or first-party company’s goals (e.g. engagement, click-through) as per phases 2 and 3 of the enshittification cycle… And we know what happens to secondary goals as systems become increasingly optimized.

                So I’m not claiming that it can’t be los dos, and indeed in phase 1 it definitely is… I’m claiming that it isn’t los dos, in practice, at this moment in history.

  • Showroom7561@lemmy.caEnglish
    371·
    3 months ago

    When did it get this bad?

    Bad? Google just proved that they can get you to stay on their search page (or come back to get a different answer) for way longer than you need… this is a WIN for them.

    The enshittification of the internet + the greed inherent in these mega corps have caused websites to be designed to grab steal your attention for as long as possible. The longer they can keep you on their site, the more money/data/attention/time they can get out of you.

    If search was designed to benefit the user, a typical visit would result in maybe 5-10 seconds of someone’s time to enter a search and click on the relevant result. You proved that when you compared it to DDG 😀

    • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      3 months ago

      Yeah except OP already said they don’t use Google anymore, presumably because they got fed up with it. As the expression goes, pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. If Google has bogged down the web search experience so much that people are defecting then they’ve gone too far.

      • Showroom7561@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Believe me, Google does enough a/b testing, and has enough experience in psychological manipulation to know where “the line” is for most people.

        Sure, some will never use their product(s) again when pushed too far, but they don’t really need everyone to be using their products.

        Only the users they can profit from the most are of value. If a terrible UI, awful UX, or even a paid subscription doesn’t scare them away from using a Google Product, then each of those users becomes a cash cow.

  • nxn@biglemmowski.winEnglish
    28·
    3 months ago

    I don’t know how much of it is specifically Google making their search engine worse vs the web being flooded with AI generated SEO trash that’s intended to keep you on the page for a few minutes when all you need is a simple one word or one sentence answer.

    It’s definitely some mix of both though because I found getting concrete answers a lot simpler a decade or two ago just by using quotes around key phrases in conjunction with what seemed to be actual operator keywords like “OR”. I personally don’t think any of that behaves the same way these days, but I have no concrete proof of this so maybe I’m just imagining things.

    Either way, I’m slowly coming to terms with the web portion of the internet being a lost cause as AI, bots, and bad actors infiltrate and abuse more and more of it.

      • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        You can also add an extension for firefox/ ff mobile. Search for udm14 and you’ll find it. Keep in mind this also kills things that are more useful like sports schedules, calculator, time in different cities etc. that Google does automatically. So if I want that I just open an incognito tab to bypass the extension.

  • atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    3 months ago

    Part of the problem is that Google now defaults to “All” (web, shopping, news, video, etc) instead of defaulting to Web only and allowing you to select if you want video, or shopping or news etc. That’s a lot of what I see complained about most.

    This is first and foremost because Google is an ad aggregation company and they literally want to keep you on the page longer to serve you more ads.

    The second problem is that the SEO for Google is so abused at this point that it’s laughable. Search engine optimisation was useful until companies and people started trying to hack it in order to have their results show up before competitors. Because large competitors also have money, it’s no longer enough to just pay to play.

    • BigDiction@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      Feel free to correct me as I see other comments saying the same thing, but I don’t believe Google wants you to spend a lot of time reviewing a specific search result.

      They don’t have refreshing display or video ads where time on site really makes a difference. They want you to click on a sponsored result, which is a paid action worth way more than a viewed impression.

      • atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        The more you scroll, the more ads they can serve on one page. So if you scroll to the bottom, don’t see the results you want, you’re likely to try to reword what you were searching for which will bring up new results and more ads. When you think about the fact that 4-5 of the first results are ads generally (if not more) and you have to scroll past those to get a result that isn’t an ad, you recognize that they are maximizing time spent looking at ads because that’s what they are selling to their real customers (the ad services for whom they aggregate).

        This scenario makes it more likely that you will click on a sponsored result, backtrack, scroll some more, not see what you’re looking for, re-word your search query, click on maybe another sponsored result, backtrack etc.

  • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    3 months ago

    I think it’s most evident when you do something like search “(venue name) Events”

    Where you would normally get the venues events page as a top hit, Google tries to get you to get that info without ever visiting their page via a card.

  • Tyoda@lemm.eeEnglish
    14·
    3 months ago

    I had to go hunting for channel IDs when I ditched the yt frontend for RSS. There is still proper working RSS for each channel, even though for some reason they removed the actual RSS button probably a decade ago.

    So I had to go to the channel page, inspect element, search for “rss”, and somewhere in the page source there would be the link (or I might have to refresh sometimes because it’s missing for whatever reason). One only needs the ID, as the rest of the link is the same, of course.

    As we both found out, it’s not as trivial as it once may have been, before @s.

    • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      It’s going to destroy so many businesses. Imagine when only one software company can afford that ad? Or one real estate agent. Or one shoe repairer. It’s a literal bidding war for the one and only answer / result. It’s despicable.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        They’ll probably mix it up, and randomize the results of different categories… I guess?

        But the last thing AI search needs is spam.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPEnglish
      12·
      3 months ago

      I’ll click on the link you sent me, and start reading carefully, trying to find the answer. Here’s how it went. I am not faking or deliberately trying any wrong things here. I’m just grabbing the most central solution it’s presenting me on any given page, and trying it.

      Here’s the progress:

      or those who come across this after the latest Data API revision (31st January, 2024), they provided the forHandle query parameter to get data of a handle/username. You can refer to this answer for details here: stackoverflow.com/a/78074066/2665606 – Saqib Ahmed Commented Feb 29 at 10:01

      Cool. I click on that question.

      YouTube released a revision on 31st January 2024 to add a forHandle parameter in the channel list API that does exactly what OP asks.

      You can call the channel list API with forHandle to get the channel ID and the upload playlist for that user/handle that you can subsequently use to fetch the videos.

      GET https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels

      Query parameters:

      forHandle=FolkartTr OR @FolkartTr OR %40FolkartTr (this allows the ‘@’ sign as well as URL encoding of it) key=<your API key> part=contentDetails

      Cool.

      $ wget -O - https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels\?forHandle=Lindybeige
--2024-10-01 01:19:52--  https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels?forHandle=Lindybeige
Resolving www.googleapis.com (www.googleapis.com)... 2a00:1450:4009:822::200a, 2a00:1450:4009:826::200a, 2a00:1450:4009:823::200a, ...
Connecting to www.googleapis.com (www.googleapis.com)|2a00:1450:4009:822::200a|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2024-10-01 01:19:52 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

      Oh. I need an API key. Okay, that one’s useless.

      I read another answer.

      If I understood correctly, your problem is that you can’t do anything from such a c/ channel id with the Channels: list of the YouTube Data API v3. If you’re just looking for the channel id linked to this id then because as YouTube Data API v3 doesn’t work for this, I would recommend you to use my open-source YouTube operational API, indeed by requesting https://yt.lemnoslife.com/channels?cId=FolkartTr you’ll receive a JSON with id equals to the channel id linked to the provided cId value.

      That means nothing to me.

      I hit back. We’re back at the original page you linked me to:

      To obtain the channel id you can view the source code of the channel page and find either data-channel-external-id=“UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg” or “externalId”:“UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg”.

      UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg will be the channel ID you are looking for.

      Already covered. It doesn’t work.

      An easy answer is, your YouTube Channel ID is UC + {YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID}. To be sure of your YouTube Channel ID or your YouTube account ID, access the advanced settings at your settings page

      And if you want to know the YouTube Channel ID for any channel, you could use the solution @mjlescano gave.

      https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels?key={YOUR_API_KEY}&forUsername={USER_NAME}&part=id If this could be of any help, some user marked it was solved in another topic right here.

      Are you getting sick of reading these? So am I! I want to remind that DDG gave me the answer at the top of the page, as a tool that would solve the problem for me.

      At any channel page with “user” url for example http://www.youtube.com/user/klauskkpm, without API call, from YouTube UI, click a video of the channel (in its “VIDEOS” tab) and click the channel name on the video. Then you can get to the page with its “channel” url for example https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfjTOrCPnAblTngWAzpnlMA.

      Edit:

      Above is not working any more. But we can open Developer Tools (cmd + option + I) and try to find the URL there. Search by channel_id for some channels, it will show you, but NOT for all the channels.

      By the way, if this is your own channel – you can go here https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/channels/list and make request with part snippet and mine true.

      Oh, I found this answer. Thank you, just works!

      Edit:

      Just in case you need UC channel id of any channel by the “YouTube handle”, you can also use ‘API Explorer’ on the right of this page https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/channels/list and enter forHandle with your ‘API key’ (let me share screenshots below)

      Sure, let’s try the Cmd+Option+I solution.

      Hey! Look at that. www.youtube.com wants to use my microphone. I can:

      • Allow while visiting this site
      • Allow this time
      • Never allow

      I think we’re done here. For all I know I would have been able to find it in the network tab of developer tools while searching for the channel, but I think the point is made. I didn’t say that the answer didn’t exist anywhere on SO, I said that the things I was trying because either Google or SO were telling me they were the answer were not working.

      Edit: I reread your comment and got confused. For me, the screenshot you’re showing has 26 points, and shows up below all of the answers that I showed above, which have 259, 79, 32, and 30 points respectively. How many points does it have on your page, to show as the second highest answer? I didn’t deliberately stop reading right before the answer. I absolutely made a sincere effort to find the answer on that page, documenting my progress as I went.

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
        14·
        3 months ago

        Oops, the answer I mentioned was 2nd only if you sorted by “recent votes count more”… Weird how that’s not the default already.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPEnglish
          17·
          3 months ago

          The mystery is solved. People are trying to provide good answers to strangers for free because they are good and helpful. Google’s senseless reorganization of things is causing them not to function anymore. And then, Stack Overflow’s bad configuration is defeating those good people’s efforts to provide them to me.

          I think we’ve learned that SO has succumbed to the same organizational syphilis that Google contracted a few years earlier.

    • edgemaster72@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Weirdly channel pages don’t seem to have that About tab for me, had to click More… on the channel description to get a popup thing where you could then share the channel and get Channel ID as described in your steps

  • AtomicHotSauce@lemmy.worldEnglish
    133·
    3 months ago

    My issue is that, every time I try to use DDG or something else, I can’t find the answers I’m looking for almost without exception, so I end up going back to a google search, where I usually do find what I’m seeking. Are there ANY viable alternatives?

      • fleet@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        I made the switch recently. I love it but do wish it was a fair bit cheaper.

      • xonigo@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        Yes SearXNG is awesome. You can even self host your own instance for added security/privacy. I have my own instance running on a free tier Oracle cloud 1core/1GB ram and it works great.

    • AlecSadler@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      3 months ago

      I’ve been using Kagi since February and it’s been superb. I typically find what I need in the first 5 results and the ability to customize it is really nice.

      It costs a little money, but honestly it’s saved me so much time over the 12,000 or so searches I’ve conducted that it’s worth it. Previously I’d sometimes have to hit up some combination of Google, Bing, DDG, Brave, etc. just to get somewhere.

    • Klaymore@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      I use Ecosia (which uses Bing results) and it seems decent, although I haven’t used Google or DDG in a while so I can’t compare.

  • ‮redirtSdeR@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    3 months ago

    my conspiracy is they added an ai that reinterprets what you search to combat seo, but it backfired and now google just gives you the wrong answer

  • kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    9·
    3 months ago

    Yeah i started to notice this as well. Also a ton of nsfw stuff nowadays seems to not show up anymore. Duckduckgo is even worse through. For what ever reason Yandex gets better results then google and duckduckgo. Not a fan of yandex in general though.

  • Donut@leminal.spaceEnglish
    81·
    3 months ago

    I’m with you but I wouldn’t trust search results that point me to a 3rd party tool to do whatever I need to do. Unless the link in question is actually well known and I’ve just been living under a rock, then don’t mind me