YouTube Video Details (Official API) — Views & Likes by URL

Bring your own free YouTube API key. Paste video URLs or IDs and get each video's views, likes, comment count, duration, tags, category, language, captions flag and publish date from the official YouTube Data API v3. 50 videos per quota unit. $0.40 per 1,000 videos.

Bring your own free YouTube API key and turn a list of YouTube links into a spreadsheet of video stats, from the official YouTube Data API v3: no scraping, no proxies, no blocks. Paste watch URLs, youtu.be links, Shorts, embed or live links, or bare video IDs, and get one row per video with views, likes, comment count, duration (ISO and seconds), title, description, tags, category, default and audio language, captions flag, HD/SD, made-for-kids flag, live status, thumbnails, topic categories and the publish date.

Built for bulk lookups: campaign and influencer reporting, refreshing the view counts of a content library, checking which videos in a sheet are private or deleted (they come back as free error rows), or enriching a list of links for analysis in Sheets, Make, n8n or Zapier.

$0.40 per 1,000 videos. IDs are batched 50 per API call, so 10,000 videos use only 200 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:

title	channelTitle	publishedAt	durationSec	viewCount	likeCount	commentCount	categoryId
Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)	Rick Astley	2009-10-25T06:57:33Z	214	1828596530	19490833	2460128	10
Me at the zoo	jawed	2005-04-24T03:31:52Z	19	445426986	20095698	10642771	1
PSY - GANGNAM STYLE(강남스타일) M/V	officialpsy	2012-07-15T07:46:32Z	253	6098344051	32321298	5465487	10

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 videos = $0.40 (leading video-details actor: $0.95 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	"videos"	Always videos on this listing (video details by URL or ID).
videoUrls	array	no	—	Videos to look up, one per line: watch URLs, youtu.be links, Shorts, embed or live URLs, or bare 11-character IDs. Duplicates are removed. Up to 50,000 per run; every 50 videos cost 1 of your 10,000 free daily quota units.

Limits & honest notes

• Lookups by video URL or ID only. To find videos by keyword, channel or playlist, use the related YouTube listings below with the same key.
• Private, deleted and invalid videos are free rows of type error and are never charged.
• 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 Playlist Scraper (Official API) — every video in a playlist

Changelog

• 2026-10-23 — Initial release: video-details-only listing of the YouTube Scraper (official API), $0.40 per 1,000 videos.

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Built and maintained by ActorForge. Reliability first: every actor in the portfolio is monitored by an automated nightly self-test, and breakages are typically fixed the same day.