n8n YouTube Transcript to Newsletter & Social Posts Webhook

Turn any YouTube video into a ready-to-send newsletter + social posts—automatically via an n8n webhook

This n8n workflow lets you POST a YouTube URL (and optionally a transcript) to a webhook, then uses OpenAI Chat Completions to generate a complete newsletter issue and repurposed social content. The response includes both structured JSON and a ready-to-use Markdown newsletter—perfect for content pipelines and fast publishing workflows.

What this workflow does

• Receives a webhook POST containing a url field for the YouTube video (and optionally a transcript string).
• Extracts the YouTube video ID from the provided URL.
• Builds the transcript: if you provide transcript, it uses that; otherwise it fetches captions from youtubetranscript.com and converts them into plain text.
• Generates content with OpenAI: sends the transcript to the OpenAI Chat Completions API with instructions to return a strict JSON payload for newsletter and social outputs.
• Parses and normalizes the AI response into structured fields such as a subject line, newsletter sections, key takeaways, an X thread, a LinkedIn post, and a call to action.
• Builds a Markdown newsletter from the structured content and returns everything in the webhook response as JSON.

Use cases

• Repurpose weekly YouTube insights into a consistent email newsletter and matching social posts.
• SaaS marketing teams: turn product demos or webinars into newsletters without manual drafting.
• Automation engineers: plug a “content generation” endpoint into your existing publishing workflow.
• Creators: generate publish-ready copy from videos with captions (or provide transcripts directly to avoid fetching failures).

Technical details

• n8n nodes/steps: webhook, code, http request, respond to webhook.
• Transcript source: youtubetranscript.com (fallback when transcript isn’t provided).
• AI generation: OpenAI Chat Completions API (set YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY in the Authorization header for the OpenAI HTTP request).

Best practice: ensure the YouTube video has captions available, or send a transcript in the request body to prevent transcript retrieval issues.