YouTube Shorts Scraper

Scrape public YouTube Shorts — by channel or by keyword search — without logging in and without a YouTube Data API key or quota. It parses the data YouTube itself embeds in its pages and paginates through YouTube's own innertube endpoints.

What it does

Give it a channel (or several) and/or a search keyword, and it returns that channel's Shorts, or the Shorts YouTube surfaces for your query, with full metadata for each one.

Input

{
  "channelUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast"],
  "searchQueries": ["funny cats"],
  "maxItems": 20,
  "includeVideoDetails": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true },
  "timeoutSecs": 30
}

• channelUrls — channel URLs (/@handle, /channel/UC..., /c/Name, /user/Name), a bare @handle, or a bare UC... channel ID. Its Shorts tab is scraped. Optional.
• searchQueries — keywords; returns the Shorts YouTube surfaces for each query. Optional.
• At least one of channelUrls / searchQueries is required.
• maxItems — max Shorts per channel and per query (paginated with continuation tokens). Default 20, up to 500.
• includeVideoDetails — when true (default) each Short's watch page is fetched for exact view/like counts, duration, publish date, channel and description. Set false for a faster, lighter run (listing fields only).
• proxyConfiguration — defaults to the free datacenter group; falls back to Residential then the Unblocker automatically if blocked.
• timeoutSecs — per-request timeout.

Output

One item per Short:

Field	Description
videoId	11-char Short ID
url	https://www.youtube.com/shorts/<id>
title	Short title
viewCount / viewCountText	Exact views (number) and the listing text ("27K views")
likeCount	Exact like count
duration / durationText	Length in seconds and as m:ss
publishDate / uploadDate	ISO timestamps
channelName / channelId / channelUrl	Author channel
description	Short description (may be empty)
thumbnail	Best available thumbnail URL
source	channel or search
inputRef	The channel/query this item came from

With includeVideoDetails: false you get videoId, url, title, viewCountText and thumbnail only (plus channel name/id for channel inputs).

On a failed input you get { "input": "...", "error": "..." } instead of a silent skip.

Notes

• No login, no YouTube Data API key, no Google quota.
• Some fields (like count, description) may be null when hidden or absent on a given Short.
• Works best with Apify Proxy; the datacenter group is usually accepted by YouTube and is free on most plans.

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