YouTube Search Scraper & Video Opportunity Intelligence

Find public videos and channels around a topic, compare the observable signals, and choose a content hypothesis worth testing. Enter one search topic; the default 25-result run is enough to inspect the shape of the evidence.

Problem → result → decision

Manual YouTube search makes it hard to compare visible views, freshness, channels, and search position across results. Give this Actor a topic and a small result cap. It exports structured public rows, an aggregate OUTPUT, and a readable REPORT.html. Use those observations to shortlist formats, channels, or topics for human review—not to predict future performance.

Three use cases

1. Compare the public reach and recency of videos for a planned topic.
2. Find recently published videos or Shorts to review before a campaign.
3. Monitor a brand or content category's visible search results over time.

Quick Start (<30 seconds)

1. Replace the sample topic if needed.
2. Leave the 25-result cap and Videos/Relevance defaults in place.
3. Click Start, then inspect the Videos Dataset view and REPORT. Narrow by date or duration only if needed.

{"searchQueries":["artificial intelligence"],"maxResultsPerQuery":25,"resultType":"videos","sortBy":"relevance"}

Full sample input: examples/INPUT.json. The first four fields are the main decisions. Upload date, duration, locale hints, and enrichment are under Advanced options; all existing API keys remain accepted.

Illustrative output row

{"record_type":"video","query":"artificial intelligence","search_position":1,"video_id":"sample12345","video_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sample12345","title":"Illustrative public video","channel_name":"Example channel","view_count":1200,"published_at":null,"views_per_day":null,"content_opportunity_score":null}

This is a sanitized schema-shaped illustration, not a live production result or a reliability claim. Actual public fields can be null. OUTPUT and REPORT.html summarize the observed results, warnings, and scoring reasons.

Pricing

video-result: USD 0.0002 per valid unique delivered video. At that event rate, 100 / 1,000 / 10,000 videos cost USD 0.02 / 0.20 / 2.00 in event charges. Search summaries, channel rows, duplicates, empty results, OUTPUT, and REPORT are not charged. The live Cloud pricing contract is authoritative; this candidate does not change it.

Evidence and limits

The Cloud-validated 0.1.2 smoke delivered 25 videos and passed Dataset, OUTPUT, and REPORT checks. That proves one observed run, not an SLA or guaranteed coverage. Public YouTube ordering and available metrics vary by time and locale. The supported query path is English-language, and an observed sample is not a complete YouTube census or a forecast of future views.

Next step: Run one topic, review the evidence, then increase the cap only if it informs a real decision. For audience discussion on a known video, use YouTube Comments.