YouTube Shorts Scraper - Channel Shorts to CSV

Export the public Shorts tab of known YouTube channels as JSON, CSV or Excel. Collect titles, Shorts URLs, public views and available channel information. No YouTube API key or media download is required.

Try a small export: Apify channel Shorts example. Free-plan result events cost $1.5 per 1,000 Short records, plus the Actor-start event. Check the Pricing tab for your account’s discounts.

Tested input

{
  "channelUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/@Apify/shorts"
  ],
  "maxResults": 3
}

Run the Actor, open Dataset → Overview, then export JSON, CSV or Excel. The example above returned 3 records in a September 10, 2026 test run. Source availability and ordering can change.

Real output

Selected fields from that run:

{
  "channel": "Apify",
  "channel_id": "UCTgwcoeGGKmZ3zzCXN2qo_A",
  "short_id": "DLhJBNCa5BM",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DLhJBNCa5BM",
  "title": "See how Half Baked reduced their development time with Apify 🚀 #developer #automation #apify #ai",
  "view_count": 1100,
  "duration_seconds": null,
  "source_position": 1
}

Input controls

Supply channelUrls as one URL or a list of up to 20 HTTPS YouTube @handle or /channel/UC... URLs, optionally ending in /shorts. Individual video URLs are not channel inputs. Duplicate canonical URLs run once. maxResults limits candidates per channel, from 1 to 1,000, with a default of 10.

Scope and field availability

This Actor reads Shorts collections from supplied channels; it does not search Shorts by keyword or discover hashtags. source_position is one-based in the returned candidate batch. Duration, follower counts and other optional fields may be null. View totals reflect the source response and do not establish future reach.

Costs, limits and failures

On the Free plan, each exported Short record costs $0.0015. The start event costs $0.00005 per allocated GB, with a minimum of one event. At 512 MB, the 3-record example costs $0.00455 in Actor events before discounts. Prices remain unchanged in this update.

Set a maximum charge in the run options. Delivery stops when the result budget is reached. Duplicate input URLs or IDs are collapsed before retrieval; rerunning the same input later is a new billable observation. Limits are upper bounds, not guaranteed row counts.

The Output tab links to SUMMARY. Source errors fail the run while retaining any valid rows already exported; successful earlier rows retain their result charges. Inspect the summary, dataset and run log before retrying. An unavailable source is not evidence that a channel, playlist or video was deleted. A legitimate empty collection or a filter excluding every video can still return zero rows successfully.

Export an existing run with Python

Install apify-client, set APIFY_TOKEN and APIFY_DATASET_ID, and export the completed dataset without starting another run:

import json
import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])
rows = list(client.dataset(os.environ["APIFY_DATASET_ID"]).iterate_items())
with open("youtube-shorts-scraper.json", "w", encoding="utf-8") as output:
    json.dump(rows, output, ensure_ascii=False, indent=2)

Save a Task for each recurring input and schedule it through Apify. API and automation workflows can reuse the same input. Compare video IDs between runs when building a monitoring database.

Questions before running

Can I scrape a single Shorts URL here? This input expects channel URLs. For a known video URL, use the video metadata tool.

Where are likes and comments? They are not part of this collection output. Do not infer zero engagement from a missing field.

Does it include every historical Short? No. Source availability and the per-channel cap bound the export.

Related YouTube workflows

• Keyword search discovers video URLs from phrases.
• Video metadata enriches known individual video URLs.
• Transcripts and subtitles exports available caption tracks.