A creator ships a video at noon. By midnight there are 40,000 comments. The pinned comment alone has 3,000 replies. The creator's team needs to find every comment the creator personally hearted (those are the ones worth turning into testimonials), separate the toxic dogpile from real critique, and watch the comment cadence rise and fall against the video's view-curve. None of that is possible inside YouTube's UI. This guide walks you through using ExportComments' YouTube Comments exporter to pull the full thread into Excel, CSV, or JSON in one pass.

Why export YouTube comments

YouTube comments became a lot more important in late 2021, when YouTube hid public dislike counts. Almost overnight, the comment thread became the only public sentiment proxy on a video — if you wanted to know whether a video landed, you had to read the room in the comments. Once you've exported the comments to a spreadsheet you can do things the YouTube UI hides:

  • Filter to comments the creator personally hearted — these are creator-endorsed and almost always the best raw material for testimonials, social proof, and B-roll quotes.
  • Surface the pinned comment and its full reply tree — pinned comments on big channels (think MrBeast's giveaway pins) routinely generate seven-figure reply threads on their own.
  • Build a time-series of comment cadence around a video's viral arc — comments per minute over the first 24 hours is the cleanest leading indicator of whether a video is breaking out.
  • Triage hate-speech and brigading by sorting reply trees by comment volume and looking for the parent that triggered the cascade.
  • Detect K-pop comment-bot patterns on M/V drops — coordinated identical comments from low-history accounts are the standard signature.
  • Pivot the parent-vs-reply tree to find the comments that actually drove the conversation, which are rarely the loudest top-level ones.

How to export YouTube comments — step by step

Step 1: Grab the video URL

Open the YouTube video and copy its URL from the browser bar. Standard youtube.com/watch?v= URLs, short youtu.be/ links, and Shorts URLs all work. The video has to have comments enabled — there's nothing to export if comments are off.

Step 2: Paste the URL into the exporter

Head to the YouTube Comments exporter and paste the URL. For several videos at once — a creator's last ten uploads, a competitor channel rollup, a campaign across collaborators — switch to bulk mode and paste one URL per line. Bulk runs return one file per URL bundled together in a single ZIP at the end of the job, so each video stays cleanly separated.

Step 3: Pick a format

Choose Excel (.xlsx), CSV, or JSON. Excel is right for filtering, pivoting, and charting immediately. JSON is right if you're feeding the data into a notebook, a sentiment model, or your own dashboard.

Step 4: Start the export

Click Export. The job runs server-side, paginating through every top-level comment and every reply. Heavy threads — million-comment MrBeast videos, M/V drops, controversy posts — take a few minutes; you can close the tab and the file lands in your dashboard plus your inbox when it's ready.

Step 5: Open the file

Open the .xlsx in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets. One row per comment, with the columns described below.

Inside the export — what fields you get

Each row is a single comment or reply. You'll find columns for:

  • commenter_handle — the public @handle on the comment.
  • channel_url — direct link back to the commenter's channel.
  • comment_text — the full body of the comment.
  • like_count — how many likes the comment collected.
  • reply_count — how many replies the comment received (top-level only; replies have an empty value).
  • parent_id — empty for top-level comments; populated with the parent comment's ID for replies, so you can rebuild the thread tree.
  • is_pinned — true if the creator pinned this comment to the top of the thread.
  • is_hearted_by_creator — true if the creator gave the comment a heart.
  • is_reply — true if the row is a reply to another comment, false if it's top-level.
  • created_at — original timestamp in UTC.

Common workflows

  • Hearted-by-creator testimonial mining — filter to is_hearted_by_creator = true, then sort by like_count. The intersection of "creator endorsed it" and "the audience endorsed it too" is the cleanest pool of social-proof quotes you'll ever find.
  • Pinned-comment thread analysis — filter to is_pinned = true to find the pinned comment, then pull every row where parent_id matches its ID. MrBeast's giveaway-style pinned comments routinely generate million-comment subthreads — that's where the giveaway entries actually live.
  • Time-series of comment cadence — bin created_at by hour, plot comments-per-hour over the first 72 hours after publication, overlay the view-curve. The shape of comment cadence often predicts whether a video has stalled or is still climbing.
  • Hate-speech and brigading triage — sort top-level comments by reply_count to find the parent comments that triggered cascades. The toxicity is rarely in the top comment itself; it's in the replies that pile on it.
  • K-pop bot-pattern detection — group by exact comment_text. Identical strings from dozens of low-history channels in a tight time window is the standard coordinated-engagement signature on M/V drops.
  • Sentiment proxy without dislikes — since the public dislike count was removed in 2021, the comment thread is the only public sentiment surface left. Sort by like_count, read the top 50 of each, and you have your sentiment read.

Plan limits and API access

The Free tier returns up to 100 comments per export, which is enough to evaluate the format. Personal scales to 5,000 results per export, Premium to 50,000, and Business to 250,000 — enough to capture comment threads on the most-watched videos on the platform. If you'd rather pull comments on a schedule or trigger an export from your own pipeline, the same job is available through the REST API and via webhooks. See pricing for the full breakdown.

FAQ

  • Does this work for Shorts?
    Yes. Shorts URLs are handled the same way as regular video URLs — paste and export.
  • Are creator-hearted and pinned comments flagged separately?
    Yes. is_hearted_by_creator and is_pinned are independent boolean columns, so you can filter on either or both.
  • Are nested replies included?
    Yes. Replies are returned alongside top-level comments and linked through the parent_id column. Sort by parent_id and is_reply to rebuild full threads.
  • What if comments are disabled on a video?
    The export will return zero rows. There is no public comment data to pull when the creator has turned comments off.
  • Can I schedule a recurring export?
    Yes. Scheduled exports are available on Premium and Business — useful for tracking comment growth on a video over its first week, when the curve is most informative.
  • What about a long list of video URLs?
    Use bulk mode: paste one URL per line and the run returns one file per URL packaged in a single ZIP, so each video's data stays cleanly separated.