YouTube Scraper — Video, Channel & Transcript Data

Scrape YouTube video metadata, channel analytics, search results, comments, and transcripts without needing a YouTube Data API key. Get structured JSON data for any public YouTube content with a single API call.

What data can you get?

Videos — Full metadata for any YouTube video: title, description, view count, like count, comment count, publish date, duration, tags, channel info, and thumbnail URL. Works with standard watch URLs, short URLs (youtu.be), embeds, and Shorts.

Channels — Channel name, subscriber count, video count, description, join date, country, profile image, and external links. Provide any channel URL including @handle format.

Search — Search YouTube and get structured results: video titles, channels, view counts, publish dates, durations, and thumbnails. Equivalent to the YouTube search page but as clean JSON.

Comments — Extract comments from any video including author name, comment text, like count, and publish date. Useful for sentiment analysis, community monitoring, and competitive research.

Transcripts — Full video transcripts with timestamps. Each segment includes the text, start time, and duration. Supports multiple languages. Perfect for content repurposing, SEO analysis, and accessibility.

Use cases

• Content research — Analyze competitor video performance, find trending topics, and track engagement metrics
• SEO and marketing — Extract transcripts for blog content, analyze video tags and descriptions for keyword research
• Sentiment analysis — Collect comments at scale to understand audience sentiment and feedback patterns
• Academic research — Build datasets of YouTube content for media studies, communication research, or NLP projects
• Brand monitoring — Track mentions of your brand across YouTube videos, comments, and search results
• Content repurposing — Convert video transcripts into blog posts, newsletters, or social media content

How to use

1. Choose an action: videos, channel, search, comments, or transcript
2. Provide URLs (for videos, channel, comments, transcript) or a searchQuery (for search)
3. Set maxResults to control output size
4. For transcripts, optionally set the language code (defaults to English)
5. Run the actor and get structured JSON data

Example input

{
  "action": "videos",
  "urls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw"
  ],
  "maxResults": 50
}

Example output

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Music Video)",
  "description": "The official video for \"Never Gonna Give You Up\" by Rick Astley...",
  "channelName": "Rick Astley",
  "channelId": "UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
  "viewCount": 1500000000,
  "likeCount": 16000000,
  "commentCount": 3000000,
  "publishDate": "2009-10-25",
  "duration": "3:33",
  "tags": ["rick astley", "never gonna give you up", "rickroll"],
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-02-19T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Supported URL formats

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
• https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID
• https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID
• https://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID
• https://www.youtube.com/@ChannelHandle
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID

Pricing

Pay-per-event pricing. You only pay for what you use:

• $0.10 per start
• $0.0003 per result item

Example: Scraping metadata for 100 videos costs $0.10 + $0.03 = $0.13 total.

Integrations

Works with all Apify integrations: webhooks, API, Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and more. Schedule regular runs to track video performance over time or monitor search rankings.

Tips

• Use the oEmbed fallback — If a video page returns limited data, the actor gracefully handles it with available metadata from the page HTML.
• Combine actions — Run the search action to find videos, then use the videos action to get full metadata for each result.
• Schedule daily runs to track view counts, likes, and comments over time for trend analysis.
• Transcript extraction works best for videos with official captions or auto-generated subtitles. Set the language parameter to get transcripts in specific languages.
• Rate limiting is built in at 1 request per second to respect YouTube's servers and avoid blocks.

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