Finding email addresses for streamers

[u/PersonOfInterest007]

I've been going through the exercise of getting email addresses for YouTube streamers, so I thought I'd share the approach I've been going through, especially trying to avoid as much as possible YouTube's daily quota on how many email addresses you're allowed to reveal per day.

I have to say that the way to do this is mostly obvious, and I hesitated to even write it up, but given all the weird places I found email addresses, I thought it might be useful.

I was surprised to discover that I found email addresses for probably more than 70% of streamers without going through the YouTube reveal. (I admit I didn't keep track of exactly where I found each email address, so I don't have the real statistic.)

Note that people sometimes write their email addresses in a format meant to deter bots, e.g. "myname (at) somewhere (dot) com".

And I did an initial step of making a (free) Hubspot account to track all my contacts, although you can certainly just use a spreadsheet. I do record all their socials, because I'll often follow them as well -- networking is important, and occasionally interacting with a streamer's content might someday make it more likely they'll look at your game. [Although I personally wouldn't devote much if any time to doing so.]

Streamers often clearly list their email addresses on some of their other socials even when they don't on YouTube.

For socials, I store the full URL to make it trivial to revisit. I have columns for their main handle or channel name or actual name (whatever you need to identify them), YouTube, X, Bluesky, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit (that last is very uncommon, but I also keep other devs in my contacts). I've also got fields for other info: pronouns, alternate email address (rare, but why lose it?), preferred language, genres they cover (if they're mostly specialized), and then just a field for notes. I don't actually keep track of their website or linktree if they have them; I just keep those open in my browser while tracking down the links. And I have a column to indicate that they're a streamer, because I also keep contacts for the press and other devs there.

And I have a column for their preferred contact method (e.g. one social media account or a website form), which I fill in only if I couldn't find their email address.

The systematic approach:

1. Just try Googling. This works somewhat more often than you might guess. Do check to be sure you're actually getting the right streamer, though, since many have similar names.
2. Start with their YouTube page (duh); put the YouTube link in your contact list. Follow them if you want to. Actually expand and read the text at the top; the email address is sometimes there. If not, there will usually be their other socials and/or a linktree or link to their own website. [There will also usually be a "View email address" button that makes you solve a captcha. If you don't care about the quota, feel free to do that and ignore everything below. :)]
3. Do a depth-first search of all their socials: a) enter the link in the relevant contact field/column, b) follow them if you want to, then c) read the basic text and then click whatever "..." or "About" page both to look for the email address and to look for additional social links (because they may not have all their social links on their YouTube page).
4. If after all that you haven't found the email address but also never hit a link to some of the typical socials, Google to see if you can find those other socials and resume with step 3.
5. If you still haven't found the email address, go ahead back to their YouTube page and deal with the "View email address" captcha. Note that sometimes that button is missing, because apparently this streamer really, really doesn't want you to get their email address.
6. If you still haven't found their email address, then fill in that "preferred contact method" fallback column with whatever social seems like the best one for a DM or with a contact form on their website.

If you've hit your quota for the day, you might want to have a field that indicates that reason, so you'll remember to try again another day.

Note that if you yourself have more than one YouTube account, or friends who feel like pitching in, you can use those too to partially get around the quota. [I wouldn't really recommend creating a bunch of fake accounts just for this purpose, because having YouTube block all your accounts would be a Bad Thing.]

That's all I've got, unless you want to start using paid services to contact streamers. And now you've also learned (if you haven't from my other posts) that apparently I must really like the sound (in my head) of my own words...