Developers Guide: Data API Protocol – Video Recommendations

A user's recommendations feed contains videos that may appeal to the user. YouTube selects recommendations for a user based on an algorithm that considers signals from a variety of sources that include the user's favorite videos, recently added playlist videos, recently watched videos, ratings and more.

To retrieve a feed containing recommendations for a logged-in user, send an authenticated HTTP GET request to the following URL.

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/default/recommendations

Note: For this request, you must provide an authentication token in the Authorization HTTP request header. This requirement ensures that recommendations are tailored to the right user, and the authentication token enables YouTube to identify the user.

The recommendations feed is a video feed as described in the Understanding video feeds and entries section. The feed contains up to eight videos but may include fewer videos if the user has not performed actions that influence the recommendations feed content.

YouTube generates and caches recommendations for a user, and then regenerates recommendations when the cache expires or a threshold fraction of the feed has been viewed.