n8n Webhook: Turn YouTube Transcripts into Newsletters & Social Posts

Turn any YouTube video into a complete newsletter + social posts—automatically via an n8n webhook.

This n8n workflow accepts a YouTube URL through a webhook, converts (or ingests) the transcript, uses the OpenAI Chat Completions API to generate newsletter and social content, and returns both structured JSON and a ready-to-publish Markdown draft.

What this workflow does

• Receives a POST request containing a YouTube url (or body.url) and optionally a transcript (or body.transcript).
• Extracts and validates the YouTube video ID from the URL.
• Uses the provided transcript if included; otherwise it fetches captions from youtubetranscript.com and converts them into plain text.
• Calls OpenAI (Chat Completions API) to generate:
  • Newsletter components (e.g., subject line, sections, takeaways)
  • Repurposed content for X (as a thread)
  • A LinkedIn post
• Parses and normalizes the OpenAI response into deliverables and builds a Markdown newsletter draft.
• Returns everything as a JSON response to the webhook caller.

Use cases

• SaaS teams repurpose product updates from YouTube into an email newsletter and LinkedIn/X posts.
• Automation engineers build a “content ingestion” endpoint to generate drafts from links without manual transcription.
• Operators centralize long-form video ideas and rapidly produce consistent newsletter + social repurposing.

Technical details

• Webhook trigger: POST payload with url and optional transcript.
• HTTP Request to https://youtubetranscript.com/ for caption retrieval (when transcript isn’t provided).
• OpenAI Chat Completions API call (replace YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY in the Authorization header).
• Code nodes for ID extraction, response parsing/normalization, and Markdown draft construction.
• Respond to Webhook node outputs structured JSON deliverables.

Requires outbound HTTP access from your n8n instance to https://youtubetranscript.com/ and https://api.openai.com/ (or you can supply transcripts directly in the request body).