📊 Find outlier YouTube videos and Shorts in your niche without an API key

⚡ 2 views · 📊 Market Research & Insights

💡 Pro Tip — YouTube’s API quotas can be a bottleneck when you’re pulling data at scale. ScraperNode is a community node with dedicated scrapers for channels, videos, and comments — no quota limits, just structured data.

Description

Quick overview

Find the YouTube videos and Shorts that got far more views than usual for their own channel. Enter a topic or a list of channels in a simple form and get a results page. No API key, no Google account, nothing to connect.

How it works

1. You enter a topic, up to 10 YouTube channels, or both, in an n8n form.
2. For a topic, the workflow finds up to 8 matching channels with YouTube’s own search.
3. For each channel it reads two public feeds: the latest 15 long videos and the latest 15 Shorts, with views and likes.
4. It works out what is usual for each channel: the median views of its other videos of the same format. Shorts are compared only with Shorts.
5. A video with at least 2x the usual views is an outlier (you choose the factor). New videos that are already ahead are marked “early”.
6. You get a page with the outliers, their thumbnails and likes, the channels used, and a ready text to paste into any AI chat to ask why these videos worked.

Setup

1. Click “Execute workflow” and open the form, or activate the workflow and use the form’s production URL.
2. Enter a topic of two or three words, such as “skincare routine”, or channels as @handle, channel link or channel ID, then click “Find outliers”.
3. If you share the form link with other people, turn on Authentication in the form node.

Customization

• Change the limits in the Settings node: channels per run, minimum subscribers, age limits, thumbnails on or off. More channels per run means more requests to YouTube.
• Raise topic_min_subscribers in Settings to leave out small channels found for a topic, or topic_min_usual_views to stop judging them.
• “Build report page” also returns the AI text as ai_prompt, so you can connect your own AI node to it. Its answer will not appear on the results page.

🔗 Nodes Used

HTTP Request, n8n Form Trigger, n8n Form

📥 Import

Download workflow.json and import into n8n: Workflow menu → Import from File

📖 Importing guide · 🔑 Credential setup