# Changelog of YouTube Creator Email & Lead Scraper (Pay Per Email Found) (`chilly_damask/youtube-creator-email-lead-scraper`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/chilly_damask/youtube-creator-email-lead-scraper/changelog.md
- **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/chilly_damask/youtube-creator-email-lead-scraper.md

## Changelog

### Unreleased

- **New extraction source — recent video descriptions.** The actor now reads the channel's most-recent video descriptions (a first-party public surface where creators routinely place a "For business inquiries: …" email that is absent from the About page) and emits any emails found tagged `source: "video"`. Verified live: a channel whose About page listed no email surfaced a business-domain address (`contact@…`) solely from its video descriptions. Two new inputs — `scanVideoDescriptions` (default on) and `maxVideosPerChannel` (default 3) — gate and bound it. Fetched over the browser request context from the signed-out watch-page HTML (`ytInitialPlayerResponse.videoDetails.shortDescription`); no extra render, no login, no comments.
- **Explicit non-goal documented — pinned comments.** Comments (pinned or not) are deliberately not read: they are absent from the signed-out watch-page HTML and load only via rotating internal continuation tokens, the fragile surface this actor avoids by design.

### 1.0 (build 1.0.2) — 2026-07-10

- **Fix:** Google/YouTube sign-in and infrastructure links (e.g. `accounts.google.com` sign-in redirects, support/policy pages) no longer leak into the `website` output field. A creator's legitimate Google-hosted site (`sites.google.com`, `docs.google.com`) is still captured. Caught via a live verification run.

### 1.0.0 — 2026-07-10

First public release.

- Public, **signed-out** extraction of creator business emails and social links from YouTube channels — reads the About-page description text, the classified About-page link list, and one optional hop to the creator's linked website / Linktree. No Google login, no CAPTCHA clicking.
- Inputs: channel URLs, `@handles`, 24-char channel IDs, and video URLs (a video resolves to its owning channel), plus keyword-based channel discovery.
- Pay-per-event pricing: **$0.02 per unique email found**, **$0.01 per keyword search** — no email found, no charge.
- Resilient engine: reads `window.ytInitialData` by key name (stable through cosmetic redesigns), 3 retries per request, regex fallback for the hydration blob, best-effort EU consent-wall dismissal, and honest `{ "status": "error" }` rows instead of silently dropped results.