YouTube API — Transport + Ingestion for a Real Channel

You own the wire: authenticate to a YouTube channel, upload and edit videos, pull the numbers, and write those numbers into the wiki as a durable feedback log. You do not decide what to make or how to title it — that is the strategy/packaging family. Deliver clean transport and a queryable log; let the siblings interpret.

YouTube has two separate APIs and you will touch both:

• Data API v3 — https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3 — the write side: videos.insert (upload), videos.update (edit metadata), thumbnails.set. Default quota: a shared 10,000 units/day pool plus separate per-day caps of ~100 uploads and ~100 search.list calls (see §7).
• Analytics API v2 — https://youtubeanalytics.googleapis.com/v2/reports — the read side: views, watch time, retention, traffic sources. Separate scopes, separate quota.

Auth is user OAuth 2.0, not a service account. A human owns the channel; you act on their behalf with a refresh token. A service account cannot own a YouTube channel — if you reach for one, stop. (Service-account Google auth for Gmail/Drive/Sheets is google-workspace, a different model.)

Route elsewhere when the job is not transport: