Keep your team updated on new YouTube videos without checking YouTube all day. This setup watches your subscriptions and emails you only the new long form videos that matter. It helps marketing teams, social media leads, and content managers track competitors, partners, and industry channels with little effort.

Every hour, a schedule pulls your YouTube subscriptions with OAuth. The flow checks for errors, splits channels, and can skip any channel you do not want. It uses each channel’s RSS feed to read the latest 15 uploads, then keeps only videos published since the last run. It calls the YouTube API for thumbnails and duration, filters out shorts and live replays without duration, and sends a clean email for each new video. Clicking the thumbnail opens the video.

You only need a YouTube account and an SMTP email account. Set the schedule frequency, choose who receives the alerts, and add optional channel filters by ID. Expect fewer missed releases and less manual checking. Use this to track competitor launches, partner updates, or brand mentions at scale while staying within YouTube quota.

• Hourly schedule with minute control to set when checks happen
• YouTube subscriptions fetched with OAuth and pagination to cover all channels
• Error check path with a stop and error node if the API call fails
• Split subscriptions to process each channel one by one for stable scaling
• Optional manual channel filter by ID to include or exclude specific sources
• RSS feed read for the latest 15 uploads per channel to reduce API costs
• Date filter keeps only videos published after the previous run time
• YouTube video details call to get high resolution thumbnails and duration
• Shorts filter using duration so only full length videos trigger emails
• Email per new video with a clickable thumbnail that opens the video

• Reduce manual channel checks from 60 minutes to 5 minutes per day
• Automate over 90 percent of monitoring by emailing only new long form videos
• Improve relevance by filtering shorts and using publish time since the last run
• Save YouTube API quota by using RSS for discovery and the API only for details
• Handle hundreds of channels while staying within default YouTube limits
• Connect YouTube updates to any inbox through SMTP with reliable delivery

1. Import the template into n8n: Create a new workflow in n8n > Click the three dots menu > Select 'Import from File' > Choose the downloaded JSON file.
2. You'll need accounts with YouTube and SMTP. See the Tools Required section above for links to create accounts with these services.
3. Open the Schedule Trigger node and set how often to check for new videos. The template runs every hour at a specific minute. Adjust to your needs.
4. Connect YouTube: double click the Get my subscriptions node, then on the Credential to connect with dropdown, click Create new credential and follow the on screen instructions to connect your YouTube account.
5. Verify the YouTube HTTP Request parameters. Keep the default parts and pagination settings to fetch all subscriptions. Leave them as provided unless you know you need changes.
6. Connect your email: double click the Send an email for each new video node, choose Create new credential for SMTP, and enter your SMTP host, port, username, and password. Set From and To addresses and send a test message using Execute Node.
7. Optional channel rules: open the Filter out channels node and add channel IDs to include or exclude. To find a channel ID, open the channel, go to the description, choose Share channel, then Copy channel ID.
8. Check the Only keep channels with unwatched videos node and leave the default logic. It reduces calls by skipping channels with no likely new content.
9. Open Keep only videos published since last run and confirm it uses the last execution time. No changes are required for normal use.
10. Run a test: click Execute Workflow. Confirm the Check for errors path is clear and that some channels move through to the RSS and email steps. If you see no emails, whitelist one active channel and try again.
11. Review one email to confirm the thumbnail opens the correct video and the sender looks right. If emails do not arrive, check SMTP credentials, spam folder, and port settings.
12. Activate the workflow. Watch logs for a day. If you hit rate limits or see gaps, lower the frequency or tighten channel filters.