How do I export YouTube comments to CSV or Excel?

Your product review video went up last week and has 3,000 comments. The marketing lead wants them in a spreadsheet by tomorrow, sorted by likes, so the team can tag complaints and feature requests. Copying from the page is hopeless past a few dozen. A short script does it in a couple of minutes.

The endpoint

YouTube video comments takes the video id and sort (top or latest) and returns about 20 comments per call, each with text, author, likes, replies and published_at. Pass page.next_cursor back as cursor until page.has_more is false.

The script

import csv, os, requests

API = "https://api.okdata.online/v1/youtube/videos/comments/list"
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['OKDATA_API_KEY']}"}
VIDEO = "dQw4w9WgXcQ"   # the v= part of the link
MAX_PAGES = 150         # about 3,000 comments

rows, cursor = [], None
for _ in range(MAX_PAGES):
    params = {"id": VIDEO, "sort": "top", **({"cursor": cursor} if cursor else {})}
    body = requests.get(API, headers=H, params=params, timeout=60).json()
    if body["code"] != "ok":
        raise RuntimeError(f"{body['code']}: {body['message']}")
    for c in body["data"]["items"]:
        rows.append([c["id"], c["published_at"], c["author"]["name"], c["likes"], c["replies"], c["text"]])
    if not body["page"]["has_more"]:
        break
    cursor = body["page"]["next_cursor"]

with open(f"{VIDEO}-comments.csv", "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8-sig") as f:
    w = csv.writer(f)
    w.writerow(["comment_id", "published_at", "author", "likes", "replies", "text"])
    w.writerows(rows)
print(len(rows), "comments saved")

utf-8-sig writes a byte-order mark, which is what makes Excel open the file with emoji and non-English text intact. The csv module quotes commas and line breaks inside comments for you.

Cost

Video size	Calls	Cost
500 comments	25	$0.10
1,000 comments	50	$0.20
3,000 comments	150	$0.60

You pay per page actually fetched. Stop early with MAX_PAGES and the bill stops there too.

What the sheet will not have

• Reply threads. You get top-level comments with a reply count, not the replies themselves.
• Exact old dates. Dates can be worked out from YouTube labels such as 2 months ago, so older comments are approximate.
• Commenter location. YouTube does not show it; the field is null.

Other ways to do it

• Official YouTube Data API. commentThreads.list costs 1 quota unit per call and includes some replies; with a Google key and a modest volume it is free and the better choice.
• youtube-comment-downloader. An open-source command-line tool, good for a one-off export if it works from your network; its issues include a recipe for turning the output into Excel.
• By hand. Under 50 comments, copy and paste is fine.

To read what the comments say at scale, see the word-of-mouth solution page.