Youtube channel subscriber count

Question

I'm trying to pull the count of subscribers for a particular youtube channel. I referred some links on Stackoverflow as well as external sites, came across links like this. Almost all the links suggested me to use youtube gdata api and pull the count from subscriberCount but the following code

$data   = file_get_contents("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/Tollywood/playlists");
$xml    = simplexml_load_string($data);

print_r($xml);

returns no such subscriberCount. Is there any other way of getting subscribers count or am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

The YouTube API v2.0 is deprecated. Here's how to do it with 3.0. OAuth is not needed.

1) Log in to a Google account and go to https://console.developers.google.com/. You may have to start a new project.

2) Navigate to APIs & auth and go to Public API Access -> Create a New Key

3) Choose the option you need (I used 'browser applications') This will give you an API key.

4) Navigate to your channel in YouTube and look at the URL. The channel ID is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/YOUR_CHANNEL_ID

5) Use the API key and channel ID to get your result with this query: https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels?part=statistics&id=YOUR_CHANNEL_ID&key=YOUR_API_KEY

Great success!

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Documentation is actually pretty good, but there's a lot of it. Here's a couple of key links:

Channel information documentation: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/sample_requests

"Try it" page: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/subscriptions/list#try-it