Yeah it would probably be the easiest way to get started. Their ToS[0] just seems so convoluted it's hard to know if you're following it or not, so I don't want to tie myself to it with no recourse.

[0]: https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/api-services-ter...

Yes, I was going to mention this. I worked for a small company that had a YouTube product that retrieved video descriptions, duration, thumbnail, etc, using the API.

We started with 100k daily API calls and that got later increased to 1 million after requesting it.

Looks like the limit is 10k/day now. What did the process look like to get an increase?

automated form for me.

Nice. And that got you from 10k to 1M?

I am at 10m+, keep in mind it isn't 1:1 with requests. Things like GET read only video metadata is one request, but if you are uploading a video, it might count as more out of your quota.

You are expected to be well behaved though. You can also lose your quota or API access for severe abuse, like using API to mass upload spam.

Very nice. I only need metadata. And if I'm not mistaken I can even batch requests to multiple video ids if I ever reach that level of scale.