n8n Webhook: Turn YouTube Transcripts into Newsletters & Posts

Turn YouTube transcripts into a ready-to-publish newsletter—instantly via webhook

With this n8n Webhook workflow, you send a YouTube URL (and optionally a transcript) and receive back a complete newsletter issue plus repurposed content for X (Twitter) and LinkedIn—returned as JSON and including a Markdown version.

What this workflow does

• Receives a POST webhook request containing a url field and (optionally) a transcript.
• Extracts the YouTube video ID from the submitted URL and throws an error if it can’t parse the link.
• Uses your provided transcript when available; otherwise it fetches captions from youtubetranscript.com and converts the XML into plain text.
• Calls the OpenAI Chat Completions API to transform the transcript into strict JSON output for:
  • a full newsletter issue
  • takeaways
  • an X thread
  • a LinkedIn post
• Parses and normalizes the AI response into structured fields and generates a Markdown-formatted newsletter.
• Responds to the webhook with a JSON payload that includes metadata (including video URL/ID and word count) and the generated content.

Use cases

• SaaS teams repurpose weekly YouTube updates into newsletters without manual writing.
• Automation engineers build a “content pipeline” that converts transcripts into social posts on demand.
• Creators and marketers submit a transcript directly to avoid fetching captions and standardize formatting.

Technical details

• Nodes / components: Code, Webhook, HTTP Request, Respond to Webhook.
• External services: OpenAI Chat Completions API and youtubetranscript.com.
• Setup required: add your OpenAI API key (e.g., replace YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY in the Authorization header) and enable outbound HTTP access to https://api.openai.com and https://youtubetranscript.com.