YouTube Playlist Scraper (Official API) — All Videos & Stats

Bring your own free YouTube API key. Get every video in one or more YouTube playlists, in playlist order, with views, likes, comments, duration, tags and publish date, plus the playlist title, owner and size, from the official YouTube Data API v3. $0.40 per 1,000 videos.

Bring your own free YouTube API key and get every video in a YouTube playlist from the official YouTube Data API v3, with no scraping and no blocks. Paste playlist links (or watch links that contain &list=), and each video comes back in playlist order with its position, views, likes, comment count, duration, title, description, tags, category, publish date, channel and thumbnails, plus the playlist title, owner and size on every row.

Use it to export a course or tutorial series, audit a music or brand playlist, compare episodes of a series, track the stats of a channel's uploads playlist (UU…), or feed a playlist into Sheets, Notion, Make, n8n or Zapier. Private and deleted entries are skipped and never charged.

$0.40 per 1,000 videos. A 200-video playlist costs about 9 of your 10,000 free daily quota units.

Get your free API key (about 60 seconds, no billing account)

1. Open the Google Cloud Console and sign in with any Google account. Create a project (top bar → New project).
2. Go to APIs & Services → Library, search for YouTube Data API v3 and click Enable.
3. Go to APIs & Services → Credentials → Create credentials → API key and copy the key (it starts with AIza).
4. Paste it into the YouTube API key field of this actor and run. The field is a secret input: Apify stores it encrypted, and the actor never logs it or writes it to the output.

You do not need to add a billing account. Each Google Cloud project gets 10,000 free quota units per day, which reset at midnight Pacific Time. If you restrict the key, allow YouTube Data API v3 and leave out HTTP-referrer or IP restrictions, because Apify runs on changing server IPs.

Official API only, and your data stays yours

• All data comes from the official YouTube Data API v3 (https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/) using your own key and quota. Nothing is scraped from youtube.com, and there are no proxies, cookies or logins.
• We never hold, share or pool API keys, and no default key is built in. ActorForge sells the API client; the data is fetched under your key.
• ActorForge keeps no copy of API data after the run. Rows go only to your run's dataset, which belongs to you. YouTube's Developer Policies require stored API data to be refreshed or deleted at least every 30 days, so set a retention period on your datasets or re-run to refresh them. Statistics such as view counts change constantly anyway.
• By using this actor you also agree to the YouTube Terms of Service. Google's handling of API requests is covered by the Google Privacy Policy. You can review or revoke your key at any time in the Google Cloud Console, and revoke API access for your Google account at Google security settings.

This actor uses YouTube API Services. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google.

What data does it return?

Every run outputs clean, schema-validated rows like these:

playlistPosition	title	channelTitle	publishedAt	durationSec	viewCount	likeCount	commentCount	playlistTitle
1	Coding Challenge 1: Starfield Simulation	The Coding Train	2016-04-13T03:17:50Z	834	1389366	29579	1386	Coding Challenges
2	Coding Challenge #2: Menger Sponge Fractal	The Coding Train	2016-04-18T00:46:47Z	841	323012	6390	374	Coding Challenges
3	Coding Challenge 3: The Snake Game	The Coding Train	2016-04-20T20:49:48Z	1647	3429714	64215	3451	Coding Challenges
4	Coding Challenge 4: Purple Rain in Processing	The Coding Train	2016-04-25T15:02:10Z	734	1922986	40867	2014	Coding Challenges

How much does it cost?

Transparent pay-per-event pricing — you only pay for what you get, and the actor always respects your run budget: set a maximum total charge and it stops cleanly at the cap instead of overrunning.

Event	Price	Charged	Worked example
video-result	$0.0004	per video row delivered (full details and stats)	1,000 playlist videos = $0.40 (leading playlist scrapers: $0.50-5.00 per 1,000)
apify-actor-start	$0.00005	per run per GB of memory (platform start fee)	One run at 256 MB = $0.0000125

Input options

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
apiKey	string	no	—	Required. Your own free YouTube Data API v3 key (starts with AIza). Get one in about a minute: console.cloud.google.com → create a project → APIs & Services → Library → enable "YouTube Data API v3" → Credentials → Create credentials → API key. No billing account is needed, and the free quota is 10,000 units per day. The key is stored encrypted by Apify, used only for this run's calls to googleapis.com, and never logged or written to the output.
mode	string	no	"playlist"	Always playlist on this listing (every video of each playlist).
playlistUrls	array	no	—	Playlists to read, one per line: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL… links, watch links that contain &list=…, or bare playlist IDs (PL…, UU… channel uploads, OLAK5uy_… albums). Personalised mixes (RD…) are not supported.
maxVideosPerPlaylist	integer	no	200	Videos read from each playlist, in playlist order. Every 50 videos cost about 2 of your 10,000 free daily quota units.

Limits & honest notes

• Public and unlisted playlists that the API returns for an API key. Private playlists, Watch Later, Liked videos of other users and personalised mixes (RD…) cannot be read.
• Private and deleted videos inside a playlist are skipped and not charged, so a playlist can return fewer rows than its listed size. Positions keep counting them, so gaps show where they were.
• You need your own free YouTube Data API v3 key (see the 4-step guide above). Without one the run finishes at once with a free row of instructions, and nothing is charged.
• Only public data the API returns for an API key: no dislike counts (removed by YouTube), no revenue and no watch time. Like counts hidden by the creator come back as null.
• You must refresh or delete stored API data within 30 days (YouTube Developer Policies III.E.4). We keep nothing after the run.
• The run's spend limit is respected: each page of videos is charged before it is delivered, and the run stops cleanly at the cap. If your key's quota runs out, the run stops cleanly and keeps what was delivered.

Related ActorForge actors

• YouTube Scraper (Official API) — Videos, Search & Stats — search, channels and comments with the same key
• YouTube Channel Scraper (Official API) — All Videos & Stats — channel stats plus every upload
• YouTube Video Details (Official API) — stats for a list of video links

Changelog

• 2026-10-23 — Initial release: new playlist mode of the YouTube Scraper (official API), playlist order and playlist fields on every row, $0.40 per 1,000 videos.

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