SignalShelf · Developer documentation

YouTube · video/sponsors

Infer possible sponsors from public YouTube video evidence. GET /api/v1/youtube/video/sponsors accepts your x-api-key header. Production live requests are disabled pending source and commercial-use authorization, including cross-channel use.

Request parameters

Combines YouTube’s public paid-promotion badge, video description, sponsor wording and links. Sponsor names are inferred rather than an official YouTube sponsor field; no evidence found does not prove a video has no sponsor. Transcript evidence is not available from this source path.

ParameterTypeRequiredDescription
urlstringYesPublic YouTube watch, Shorts or youtu.be URL. Private, unlisted-only, age-gated and otherwise inaccessible videos are not extracted.
languagestringNoOptional two-letter YouTube page language hint.
freshnessstringNo24h (default), 1h, 7d, or live. Accepted cache hits are free; live forces refresh except simultaneous requests may share newly fetched data.

Code examples

Set SIGNALSHELF_BASE_URL and SIGNALSHELF_API_KEY on your server.

REQUEST EXAMPLE
curl "$SIGNALSHELF_BASE_URL/api/v1/youtube/video/sponsors?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D2reQut8WNGc" \
  -H "x-api-key: $SIGNALSHELF_API_KEY"

Response and pagination

The response contains data and meta. data includes platform, resource, sample:false, provider, and the public source payload. Lists return data.items; individual resources return data.data.

Author feeds include data.next_cursor. Return it unchanged in cursor for the next page. Feed entries can include reposts. Single-post lookups resolve the handle to a DID first. Deleted or moderated posts may be unavailable.

meta includes event_id, mode, cache, credits_charged, fetched_at, age_seconds, and duration_ms. A fresh successful result costs one credit; accepted cached results and failures cost zero.

Availability and failures

Implementation is not a continuous availability guarantee. Source rate limits, retention, deleted content, restrictions, and regional availability apply. This is an independent SignalShelf contract, not a drop-in competitor response format.

400: invalid parameters. 401: missing/revoked key. 402: insufficient credits. 404: missing public resource. 429: SignalShelf throttle. 502/503: upstream failure or rate limit, with credit restored.

Explore the API in your workspace. Sample results and accepted cache hits cost zero credits. Open the playground →