YouTube Channel Monitor: Every New Video From Every Channel You Watch

Know what your competitors, your creators and your category published, without opening YouTube.

Watching a list of channels by hand does not survive contact with a busy week. Subscriptions get buried, the algorithm reorders everything, and the video you needed to see is three weeks old by the time you find it.

Give this a list of channels and get every video they published, newest first, with the title, link, full description, thumbnail, view count and rating.

Built for marketers tracking competitor content, brands running creator partnerships, media teams watching a category, and anyone who reports on what a set of channels is putting out.

How it works

flowchart LR
    A[Handles, URLs<br/>or channel ids] --> B{Already a<br/>channel id?}
    B -->|yes| D[Read the channel feed]
    B -->|no| C[Resolve the handle<br/>to a channel id]
    C --> D
    D --> E[Filter by date,<br/>keywords and views]
    E --> F{New since<br/>the last run?}
    F --> G[(Your video feed)]

No API key and no quota. YouTube publishes a feed for every channel, and that is what this reads.

What you get

One row per video. A real row from a live run:

{
  "channel": "Marques Brownlee",
  "channelId": "UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ",
  "videoId": "mfmdXPT7nAM",
  "title": "I Said Yes to Every Email for a Month! (Again)",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfmdXPT7nAM",
  "publishedAt": "2026-08-21T18:53:07.000Z",
  "views": 4592739,
  "ratingCount": 104629,
  "ratingAverage": 5,
  "thumbnail": "https://i2.ytimg.com/vi/mfmdXPT7nAM/hqdefault.jpg",
  "descriptionExcerpt": "Sometimes the inbox wins."
}

View counts and ratings are included, so you can sort a week of competitor uploads by what actually landed rather than by what was posted.

Paste whatever you have

Handles, full URLs, old vanity URLs and raw channel ids all work:

{
  "channels": [
    "@mkbhd",
    "https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium",
    "https://www.youtube.com/c/mkbhd",
    "UCsBjURrPoezykLs9EqgamOA"
  ],
  "days": 7,
  "onlyNewVideos": true
}

A channel page names several channel ids, including the recommended channels in its sidebar. The Actor reads the canonical one, so a handle never resolves to somebody else's channel.

Running it as an alert feed

Turn on onlyNewVideos and schedule it. The Actor remembers what it has reported, so each run returns only what is new and the dataset becomes an inbox rather than a growing pile. Add keywords to watch for a topic instead of a whole channel.

Run it from the command line

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/arched_friend~youtube-channel-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "channels": ["@mkbhd", "@veritasium"],
    "days": 30
  }'

Pricing

$0.003 per video returned. A channel that published nothing in the window costs nothing.

	This Actor	YouTube Data API	Social listening SaaS
30 channels, daily	about $2 a month	Free until the quota, then blocked	$99 to $500 a month
API key needed	No	Yes, plus a Google Cloud project	No
Daily quota	None	10,000 units, spent fast	Their limits
View counts	Yes	Yes	Usually
Data you own	Dataset, API, webhook	Yours to store	Their dashboard

Notes and limits

• YouTube publishes the 15 most recent videos per channel in its feed. A long lookback returns whatever those 15 cover, so for daily or weekly monitoring it is plenty and for deep archive work it is not.
• A brand new upload sometimes has no view count yet. That comes through as null rather than 0, and a minimum views filter never hides it.
• Live streams and shorts appear in the feed like any other video.
• Channels that are deleted, renamed to a handle that no longer exists, or region blocked are reported in the run summary under channelsNotResolved with the reason, rather than failing the run.

Related products

• Competitor Content Tracker for the blog posts those same companies publish.
• Hacker News Brand Monitor for where your product gets discussed.
• App Store Review Tracker for what users say inside your app.