📱 YouTube Shorts Scraper — Channel Shorts Data Extractor

YouTube Shorts Scraper is a production-grade Apify Actor for extracting YouTube Shorts data straight from any channel — no official Data API key, no login, no quota. Give it one or more channels and it returns every Short's views, likes, comments, hashtags, subtitles and upload date, plus the full channel profile (subscribers, totals, About panel, links) — streamed to your Apify Dataset in real time.

💡 Need a custom version, private integration, or a tailored pipeline? Email hello.dataminds@gmail.com.

Built for content researchers, marketers, influencer/creator-outreach teams, social listening & trend analysis, and AI/LLM data pipelines — anyone who needs clean YouTube Shorts data without scrolling by hand or wrestling with API quotas.

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📑 Table of contents

• What is YouTube Shorts Scraper?
• Main features
• Who is this Actor for?
• What the scraper does
• Inputs it accepts
• Output format (Dataset)
• Example output (JSON)
• Error items
• Quick start
• Input parameters reference
• Reliability & anti-blocking
• Integrations & automation
• Pricing & how to control cost
• Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
• Troubleshooting
• Help, support & custom builds
• Is scraping YouTube legal?
• SEO keywords targeted

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📱 What is YouTube Shorts Scraper?

The official YouTube Data API charges you in daily quota units, has no dedicated "Shorts" endpoint, and still needs a Google Cloud key to set up.

This Actor is a drop-in replacement that works straight out of the box:

• Accepts any channel — a username, an @handle, or any channel/Shorts URL.
• Returns the full Short record — title, URL, thumbnail, duration, upload date, hashtags, view/like/comment counts, subtitle-track availability.
• Reads the channel About panel — description, country, join date, exact subscriber/view/video counts, and every external link.
• Sorts and filters — Newest / Popular / Oldest, plus a date cutoff (YYYY-MM-DD or "last N days").
• Streams every finished result to your Dataset — export to JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or pull them through the Apify API.

If you have ever needed "every recent Short from this channel, with view counts and channel details, as clean rows" — this is the Actor.

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✨ Main features

• 🔗 Flexible channel input — plain username, @handle, or a full channel/Shorts URL, mixed freely in one bulk field.
• 📱 Every Short field that matters — views, likes, comments (count + turned-off flag), duration, upload date, hashtags, description links, members-only/paid-promotion flags.
• 📝 Subtitle-track metadata — language, auto-generated flag, and the caption URL for every Short that has one.
• 📺 Channel enrichment on every row — subscriber count, total videos/views, join date, country, verified badge and About-panel links, attached to every Short from that channel.
• 🔃 Sort control — Newest, Popular or Oldest, matching the chips on the channel's own Shorts shelf.
• 📅 Date filtering — an absolute date or a relative "last N days" cutoff, with automatic early-stop once results scanned pass it.
• 🚦 Automatic network fallback — direct ➜ datacenter ➜ residential, sticky after the first switch, with a last-resort browser session.
• 📦 Live dataset writes and six prebuilt table views — Overview, Channel & About, Engagement, Media, Source, Errors.
• 📊 Run summary stored in the key-value store, with per-run totals.

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👥 Who is this Actor for?

• 🔬 Content & trend researchers — track what's performing on a channel's Shorts shelf without manual scrolling.
• 📈 Marketers & SEO teams — mine titles, hashtags and posting cadence for content ideas.
• 🤝 Creator/influencer outreach — pull channel details and subscriber counts for partnership lists.
• 👂 Social listening tools — monitor a competitor or brand's Shorts output over time.
• 🤖 AI / LLM data pipelines — clean, structured Shorts data for RAG and fine-tuning.
• 🗃️ Analytics & BI teams — feed a warehouse with view/like/comment time series per channel.
• 🧑‍💻 Developers — a dependable YouTube Shorts data source with no quota-limited API key to manage.

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⚙️ What the scraper does

1. Reads every channel you provide — one bulk field, any format welcome.
2. Opens that channel's Shorts shelf and its About panel for full profile details.
3. Collects the full Short record the moment it finds one — title, stats, thumbnail, hashtags.
4. Saves every finished result straight to your Dataset — you can watch results land in the Console in real time.
5. Keeps going even when some channels fail — a channel with no Shorts, or one that doesn't exist, is logged as a clear error row without stopping the run.
6. Reports a full run summary at the end — totals, network route used, and duration.

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📥 Inputs it accepts

Input type	Example	Notes
Username	mrbeast	No @ needed
Handle	@mrbeast	With or without the @
Channel URL	https://www.youtube.com/@mrbeast	Also /channel/UC…, /c/…
Shorts shelf URL	https://www.youtube.com/@mrbeast/shorts	Same channel, either form works

All of the above can be mixed freely in a single run — paste one per line, or upload a file.

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📤 Output format (Dataset)

Every record streams to the dataset the moment it's ready, organized into six ready-made Console views:

View	What it shows
✨ Overview	Title, channel, views, likes, comments, date, duration, link
📺 Channel & About	Subscriber/view/video totals, country, join date, verified badge, About links
📊 Engagement	Views, likes, comments, comments-off, members-only, paid-promotion, age-restricted, hashtags
🎞️ Media	Thumbnail, duration, hashtags, subtitle-track metadata, description
🧭 Source	Short ID, originating channel input, Shorts shelf link, collection order
⚠️ Errors	Any channel that could not be processed, with a clear reason

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🧾 Example output (JSON)

{
  "title": "World's Largest Tennis Match",
  "translatedTitle": null,
  "type": "shorts",
  "id": "5mU6SRS2Bxo",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5mU6SRS2Bxo",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5mU6SRS2Bxo/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "viewCount": 8568953,
  "date": "2026-08-23T16:00:04.000Z",
  "likes": 202000,
  "channelName": "MrBeast",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA",
  "channelUsername": "MrBeast",
  "channelId": "UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA",
  "numberOfSubscribers": 515000000,
  "channelTotalVideos": 999,
  "channelTotalViews": 138494809693,
  "isChannelVerified": true,
  "duration": "00:00:51",
  "commentsCount": 21521,
  "commentsTurnedOff": false,
  "hashtags": [],
  "isMembersOnly": false,
  "isPaidContent": false,
  "isAgeRestricted": false,
  "input": "https://www.youtube.com/@mrbeast",
  "fromChannelListPage": "shorts"
}

Every record also carries the channel's About-panel details (channelDescription, channelJoinedDate, channelDescriptionLinks, channelLocation, channelAvatarUrl, channelBannerUrl) both at the top level and nested under aboutChannelInfo, plus subtitles (caption-track metadata) when available.

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⚠️ Error items

When the scraper cannot retrieve data for a given input — for example a channel has no Shorts or does not exist — it pushes an error item to the dataset instead of silently skipping it. Normal output items are never affected; you can tell them apart by the presence of an error field. Check the ⚠️ Errors view in your dataset.

{
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/@somechannel",
  "input": "somechannel",
  "error": "CHANNEL_HAS_NO_SHORTS",
  "note": "Channel exists but has no Shorts"
}

Error codes reference

error	Meaning
CHANNEL_DOES_NOT_EXIST	Channel URL points to a channel that does not exist
NOT_FOUND	Page was not found / could not be reached
VIDEO_UNAVAILABLE	A Short is not available (deleted, region-blocked, etc.)
AGE_RESTRICTED	Channel is age-restricted and cannot be accessed without login
CHANNEL_HAS_NO_SHORTS	Channel exists but has no Shorts
DATE_FILTER_TOO_STRICT	Shorts exist but none match the active date filter
NO_RESULTS	No results collected for this input
NO_VALID_START_URLS	No valid channels were provided
INVALID_INPUT	Actor failed due to bad configuration

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🚀 Quick start

Apify Console

1. Log in at console.apify.com → Actors → open YouTube Shorts Scraper.
2. Paste one or more channels (username, @handle, or URL).
3. Adjust the Shorts-per-channel limit, sort order or date filter if you want, then click Start.
4. Watch the log and the Output tab fill up in real time.
5. Export to JSON, CSV or Excel when it's done.

API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/YOUR_USERNAME~youtube-shorts-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"channels":["mrbeast"],"maxResultsShorts":10}'

Python client

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("YOUR_USERNAME/youtube-shorts-scraper").call(run_input={
    "channels": ["mrbeast"],
    "maxResultsShorts": 10,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["title"], item["viewCount"])

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⚙️ Input parameters reference

🚀 Start here

Field	Type	Default	Description
channels	array	[]	Channel usernames, @handles, or URLs — bulk input
maxResultsShorts	integer	20	Max Shorts to collect per channel

🔎 Sorting & filtering

Field	Type	Default	Description
sortChannelShortsBy	string	NEWEST	NEWEST / POPULAR / OLDEST
oldestPostDate	string	—	YYYY-MM-DD, or "N days" for the last N days

🌍 Network & reliability

Field	Type	Default	Description
proxyConfiguration	object	no proxy	Automatic direct → datacenter → residential fallback unless overridden
browserFallback	boolean	true	Last-resort browser rescue for stubborn requests

⚡ Speed & limits

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxConcurrency	integer	5	Parallel Short-detail fetches per channel
maxRetries	integer	3	Retries per request on the current network route
maxScanned	integer	5000	Safety cap on Shorts scanned per channel (0 = no cap)

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🛡️ Reliability & anti-blocking

This Actor starts every run on a direct connection — no proxy overhead unless it's actually needed. If YouTube pushes back, the run automatically and transparently escalates:

Direct connection ➜ datacenter proxy ➜ residential proxy (3 retries) ➜ last-resort browser session

Once the run escalates to a residential route it stays there for every remaining request, so you don't pay for a slower route longer than necessary. Every fallback is logged clearly in the run log. You can also pin your own proxy group in Proxy configuration to skip the automatic ladder entirely.

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🔌 Integrations & automation

• Schedules — run this Actor daily/weekly to track a channel's newest Shorts.
• Webhooks — fire ACTOR.RUN.SUCCEEDED to your own endpoint when a run finishes.
• Zapier / Make / n8n — feed dataset items straight into a spreadsheet, CRM or Slack alert.
• MCP / AI agents — call this Actor as a tool from Claude, Cursor or any MCP-compatible client via mcp.apify.com.
• REST API — pull dataset items directly: GET https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/{datasetId}/items?format=json.

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💰 Pricing & how to control cost

This Actor runs on Apify's pay-per-usage pricing — you pay for the platform compute, proxy and storage your run consumes, no separate per-result fee. To control cost:

• Start with a low maxResultsShorts to sample a channel before a full run.
• Leave Proxy configuration on automatic — it only escalates to a paid proxy route when actually needed.
• Set a tight oldestPostDate when you only care about recent uploads — the scraper stops early once it passes the cutoff.

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❓ Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Does this need a YouTube Data API key or quota? No — it works without any Google API key or daily quota limit.

Can I scrape an entire channel's Shorts? Yes — add the channel and set maxResultsShorts as high as you need.

Does it return channel details? Yes — every Short carries subscriber count, total videos/views, join date, country and About-panel links from its channel.

Can I filter by upload date? Yes — set oldestPostDate to an absolute date or a relative "N days" value.

Does it work for private or age-restricted channels? No — only publicly available YouTube pages are read, same as any anonymous visitor would see.

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🛠️ Troubleshooting

Symptom	Fix
A channel comes back as an error row	Check the ⚠️ Errors view for the reason — usually the channel is private, deleted, or has no Shorts
Fewer Shorts than maxResultsShorts	The channel may simply have fewer Shorts than requested, or the date filter is too strict
Run seems slow	Lower maxConcurrency, or check if the run escalated to a slower proxy route in the log

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🆘 Help, support & custom builds

Something not working, or need a custom field, private integration or a bespoke pipeline built on top of this Actor? Email hello.dataminds@gmail.com — we read every message.

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⚖️ Is scraping YouTube legal?

This Actor only reads publicly available YouTube pages — the same pages any anonymous visitor's browser can load. It does not bypass logins, paywalls or private content, and it does not extract private user data such as email addresses. You are responsible for how you use the collected data — respect YouTube's Terms of Service, applicable copyright law, and privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) for your jurisdiction and use case.

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🔑 SEO keywords targeted

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