YouTube Automation: What It Is And How To Use It

YouTube is one the largest and most popular video-sharing platforms in the world, with over 2 billion monthly active users.

Old news, right?

YouTube has become an essential tool for businesses, brands, and individuals looking to reach a wider audience, build a community or make sales.

It has become a very lucrative platform, thanks to its revenue-sharing business model.

The downside?

Every single business wants a piece of it.

With so much competition on the platform, it can be challenging to get your videos seen by your target audience.

This is where YouTube automation comes in.

What is YouTube Automation?

YouTube automation is the action of using software tools, bots, or scripts to automate certain tasks on the YouTube platform. This can include tasks such as uploading videos, commenting on videos, liking videos, subscribing to channels, and even generating views or engagement on videos.

YouTube automation can be used for both legitimate and fraudulent purposes.

For example, some aspects of YouTube automation can be helpful, such as using software to schedule uploads or manage comments.

However, other forms of automation can be against YouTube’s terms of service and can lead to accounts being suspended or terminated.

How to use YouTube Automation?

There are many ways you can use YouTube automation to grow your channel with less effort or scale your YouTube business.

Video production

You can automate any step of the video production process by outsourcing it to an agency.

There are experts in YouTube video scriptwriting, filming, and of course video editing.

We handle the post-production for many different YouTube channels.

So that’s one way you can use YouTube automation.

You can also use video creation tools such as Animoto, Powtoon, and Biteable that can help you create videos for your channel with minimal effort.

Scheduling videos

YouTube has its own built-in scheduling feature that lets you upload videos in advance and schedule them to go live at a specific date and time.

There are also many different third-party options you can use for scheduling YouTube videos. Tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and Later are some of the most popular.

Scheduling YouTube videos in advance is a great idea because it helps with consistency, and lets you publish videos at optimal times in order to get more views and more engagement.

Comments and Engagement

This is definitely something that’s in the grey area.

You can use bots and software tools to automatically leave comments on other people’s videos or engage with your audience by liking or responding to comments.

It’s not something that we recommend and it’s also against YouTube’s terms of service.

Subscribers

Another aspect that you can automate and that’s also on the dark side of YouTube automation is subscribing.

You can use bots to automatically subscribe to other people’s channels or encourage others to subscribe to your own channel.

Again, this is not what we do or recommend, but if you want to go that route there are tools to help you.

Views and Engagement

Last but not least, there are also tools that you can use to automate views, likes, and engagement on your own videos.

What is a YouTube Automation Channel or Business?

A YouTube Automation Channel is the idea that you can start a YouTube channel and start uploading videos without showing your face and then monetize it using ad revenue, sponsors, patrons, or other ways.

Does it work?

You bet.

There are people making thousands or tens of thousands per month, just by uploading videos to YouTube channels without ever getting on camera themselves.

If fact, that’s how I first got into video editing.

By starting a YouTube automation channel way back in 2015. I don’t even know if the term YouTube automation was around back then.

Did it work out well for me?

Yes and no.

The channel did great, it was getting hundreds of thousands of views per video and it had an audience that was engaging with the content.

The problem was that it was heavily using bits and pieces of footage from other creators’ videos and I ended up with a lot of copyright claims.

Eventually, the channel got demonetized by YouTube, but if you produce your own original content or you adhere to the fair use rules you will be fine.

Using tools, software or even hiring YouTube video editors or assistants that take care of the video production, upload, schedule, thumbnail creation, comments, and so on is also something that’s referred to as YouTube automation.

Examples of YouTube Automation Channels

YouTube’s full of so-called automated channels.

These are channels that don’t have a person as the face of the channel.

Instead, they use stock footage, bit and pieces of footage from other channels or sources, a voice-over, text, and background music to tell a story.

Here are some examples.

BeInspired

BeInspired is a motivational channel based in Romania (the same as our video editing agency).

They don’t post a ton of videos but they definitely get a ton of views.

They also have 8+ million subscribers.

So there you have it, YouTube automation at its finest.

Motiversity

Another great example is Motiversity, with videos that constantly get a few hundreds of views.

YouTube Automation Tools

Here are some of the best and most popular YouTube automation tools you can use to streamline the operations for your channel.

Tubebuddy

TubeBuddy is an automation tool that works as a browser extension on your computer or mobile app on your phone.

It is designed to help YouTube creators optimize and manage their channels.

It offers quite a lot of features to help YouTubers improve their video SEO, do keyword research, as well as track analytics.

TubeBuddy offers both a free and a paid version, with the latter providing more advanced features and functionality.

The features that really made TubeBuddy popular and the ones that I personally like to mosts are thumbnail generation, A/B testing and bulk scheduling of the videos.

It’s definitely a time and effort saver, espcially when you are running multiple channels. I know social media agencies love it.

YouTube Studio

YouTube Studio is YouTube’s built-in backend or platform.

Many content creators use YouTube Studio just to manage their channel or analyze the performance of their channel, look at view counts, earnings and other key metrics.

However, YouTube Studios does offer a handful of automation features for free, that can come in very handy, such as:

Scheduling: Creators can schedule their videos to be published at a specific time and date, which can help them plan ahead and save time.

Automatic thumbnail generation: YouTube Studio can automatically generate suggested thumbnails for videos, which again can save time and money for creators who may not have the resources or design skills to create their own.

Video trimming: YouTubers can use YouTube Studio’s basic video editing tools to trim their videos, which can help automate the editing process.

Comment filters: YouTube Studio allows creators to set up automatic filters to moderate comments based on certain criteria, such as profanity or spam, which can help automate the moderation process.

Automatic translation: YouTube Studio can automatically translate comments into the creator’s preferred language, which can help automate the process of responding to comments in multiple languages.

VidIQ

VidIQ is another popular tool that works both as a web-based tool and browser extension.

It’s very similar to Tubebuddy in many aspects, it basically comes down to personal preference when chosing one or the other.

The thing I like to most about VidIQ is their A/B performance test between the automatically generated thumbnails.

It also offers powerful competitor tracking, you can track and monitor the performance of certain type of channels or certain type of videos and see what performes best.

This can help automate the process of staying up-to-date on industry trends, and best practices and can help you come up with new video ideas that are more likely to get more traction or even go viral.

Zapier

Zappier is a super versatile and powerfull tool that you can use to connect and automate tasks between different web applications.

It’s not specifically designed for YouTube, but if you get creative with it there are a bunch of different things you can do to automate the efforts behind your YouTube channel.

Zapier integrates with over 3,000 web applications, including popular tools like Google Sheets, Trello, Slack, Gmail, and more.

It works through APIs to connect all these apps.

You can automate tasks such as data entry, file transfers, notifications, and more, without needing to write any code or have any technical skills.

How can that be applied to YouTube?

Simple.

Zapier can be used for YouTube automation by integrating with the YouTube API and other web applications.

Here are some use cases we test in the past.

Automatically post new videos to social media: You can set up a Zap to automatically share any new YouTube videos on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Track YouTube analytics: You can use Zapier to automatically collect and analyze YouTube analytics data in spreadsheets or other tools, such as Google Sheets or Excel (if you’re a numbers guy or gal).

Send notifications: You can set up a Zap to send a notification to your phone or email whenever someone comments on their YouTube video or when they receive a new subscriber.

The Good and the Bad of YouTube Automation

There are both advantages and disadvantages to using YouTube automation.

The pros

1. Saves Time and Effort: Automation can help you streamline your workflow and save time and effort by automating repetitive tasks.
2. Consistency: Automation ensures that your channel remains active even when you’re not actively creating content.
3. Scaling: Automation can help you scale your channel and reach a wider audience.

The cons

1. Risk of Penalties: YouTube’s terms of service prohibit the use of certain forms of automation, and violating these rules can lead to your account being suspended or terminated.
2. Lack of Authenticity: Automated comments, likes, and engagement can come across as spammy and lack authenticity.
3. Lower Quality: Automated content creation tools may not produce content of the same quality as human-created content.