YouTube Shorts Scraper — Views, Likes & Metadata

Collect public YouTube Shorts from a channel's Shorts tab or from keyword search — with exact view and like counts, duration and publish date. No YouTube Data API key, no Google quota, no login.

What it returns (one row per Short)

• videoId, url (/shorts/...), title, thumbnail
• viewCount (exact) and viewCountText, likeCount
• duration (seconds) and durationText
• publishDate, uploadDate, description, isLiveContent
• channelName, channelId, channelUrl
• source (channel or search), inputRef, scrapedAt

Use cases

• Viral-Shorts research — what's working for a keyword or niche right now.
• Competitor / creator tracking — monitor a channel's Shorts and their performance.
• Content strategy — compare duration, publish dates and engagement.
• Datasets for analytics or AI training pipelines.

Example input

{
  "channelUrls": ["@MrBeast"],
  "searchQueries": ["cats"],
  "maxItems": 20,
  "includeVideoDetails": true
}

Example output (real run)

{
  "videoId": "0vMVQ4CPNCc",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0vMVQ4CPNCc",
  "title": "Cats, but they love water more!😹",
  "viewCountText": "49M views",
  "channelName": "purfectmeowments",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0MqopaaR1MirsJuL6pFVgA",
  "source": "search",
  "inputRef": "cats",
  "viewCount": 49155490,
  "likeCount": 1123517,
  "duration": 42,
  "durationText": "0:42",
  "publishDate": "2025-03-25T17:06:08-07:00",
  "isLiveContent": false
}

Why choose this Actor

• Pay only for results — pay-per-event pricing, no monthly rental and no minimum charge.
• No login and no official API key needed and no Google quota.
• Structured output — clean JSON rows you can export to CSV, Excel or push into your pipeline via the Apify API, webhooks or integrations.
• Honest by design — if a field is not available it is returned as null/missing and failed inputs return an explicit error; nothing is invented.
• Maintained — report any issue on the Issues tab and it gets looked at quickly.

Limitations (honest notes)

• Does not return comments, hashtags lists or audio/sound info (hashtags may appear inside description).
• description and likeCount can be null when hidden or empty on a given Short.
• Search results are whatever Shorts YouTube surfaces for the keyword; maxItems applies per channel and per query.
• includeVideoDetails: false is faster/lighter but returns listing fields only (no exact likes, duration or dates).

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