Downloads of a Python Tool That Pulls YouTube Transcripts Grew 30.6x in Two Years and Now Outpace Video Downloaders

Summary

Picture a personal trainer who posts a 12-minute YouTube video on knee-friendly squats. An AI assistant later recommends her method to someone asking about knee pain, quoting a tip she only ever said out loud. The assistant did not watch the video; something pulled the transcript.

In Python, the most common way to grab YouTube captions is a small open-source package called youtube-transcript-api. Other tools download whole videos, and Reddit wrappers pull forum posts and comments. Download counts on the Python Package Index show which of these sources developers are wiring into their software.

Transcript pulling is growing fastest. The transcript package was downloaded 20,875,866 times in the Q3 2026 sample days, 30.6x two years earlier, and since Mar 2026 it has been downloaded more often than all three video downloader packages combined.

What we measured

We queried the public PyPI download log in Google BigQuery (bigquery-public-data.pypi.file_downloads), which records one row for every file downloaded from the Python Package Index. To keep the query affordable we sampled the first seven days of every month from January 2022 through September 2026, 399 days in total, and summed downloads by month, package, country, CI flag, installer and weekday versus weekend into one working table. A quarter in this study therefore means 21 sampled days (days 1 to 7 of each of its three months), not a full quarter. We removed downloads made by mirroring and proxy tools (bandersnatch, Nexus, Artifactory, devpi), which copy packages in bulk rather than install them. To control for the growth of PyPI itself we also pulled total daily download counts for the whole index from the table's partition metadata for the same sampled days.

We tracked three groups: the transcript package youtube-transcript-api; video downloaders yt-dlp, pytube and pytubefix; and Reddit API wrappers praw and asyncpraw. None of these packages is made by YouTube or Reddit. yt-dlp is also distributed outside PyPI as a standalone program, so its PyPI count is only part of its use.

Transcripts grew far faster than video or forum tools

Quarterly downloads for each group (21 sampled days).

The transcript package stayed under 70,000 sampled downloads per quarter through Q4 2023, then climbed in steps. Its largest jump came in Q1 2026, when downloads went from 3,013,672 to 10,355,533, and then 17,875,422 in Q2.

Transcript downloads now beat video downloads

Weekly downloads (days 1 to 7) since October 2025.

Grabbing a transcript is much lighter than downloading a video, and text is what language models read. The crossover fits a shift toward pulling spoken words from video for AI use, though download data alone cannot show what each project does with the text.

Most transcript downloads look automated

Download signals by group, Q3 2026 sample days.

Transcript tool downloads kept 94.8% of their weekday pace on weekends in Q3 2026, above the 65.5% for PyPI overall. By IP location, United States led with 83.1%, followed by Singapore (2.8%) and Japan (1.5%).

What this means

If you publish videos, the words you say are likely to be read by machines as text. That makes captions worth getting right: upload a corrected transcript instead of relying on auto-captions, say your business name and location clearly, and state your main points in plain sentences. Transcripts are an easy piece of SEO for AI search that many video publishers skip. The same goes for answers you give in community forums, which AI tools also pull from.

Video and forum content can be a strong source for AI answers about your business. To see which of your videos, threads and pages AI assistants already use, ask for a free AI visibility audit.

Limits

A download is not a user. One developer, one Docker build or one CI job can download the same package many times, and a single busy pipeline can move a package's numbers sharply from month to month.

Figures cover the first seven days of each month only (21 days per quarter), so they are sample totals, not full-month or full-quarter totals. Growth rates compare like-for-like sample periods.

PyPI as a whole grew from 12.1 billion downloads in the Q3 2022 sample days to 115.0 billion in the Q3 2026 sample days (9.5x), so part of every package's growth is the index growing. We report share of all PyPI downloads where it matters.

PyPI-wide downloads in the September 2026 sample week were 38.1% lower than in the August 2026 sample week (28.7 billion vs 46.4 billion), so September figures for individual packages should be read with that drop in mind.

The CI flag is only populated in this dataset from March 2024, and it only catches environments that announce themselves as CI. Automated downloads that do not set a CI variable are counted as non-CI.

Country codes come from the downloading IP address. Cloud servers sit mostly in the United States, so country splits describe where machines run, not where developers live.

None of these packages is an official YouTube or Reddit product, and some may stop working when the platforms change.

Video downloaders are used for many non-AI purposes, and yt-dlp is often installed outside PyPI.

Download data cannot show whether transcripts or posts were used to train models, to answer questions or for something else.

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