YouTube Video List Scraper

Scrapes video listings from YouTube channels and playlists — video title, view count, duration, publish date, thumbnail, and more. Optionally enriches each video with extra detail-page data such as full description and exact publish date. Output is delivered as structured JSON, ready for export to CSV or Excel.

Target website: youtube.com

⚖️ Legality of this actor

This actor only collects data that is already publicly visible on YouTube's channel, Shorts, and playlist pages — no login, paywall, or private content is accessed. Scraping publicly available data is generally considered legal, and this is consistent with rulings such as hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn. Users are responsible for ensuring their use of the collected data complies with YouTube's Terms of Service and any applicable laws in their jurisdiction (e.g. GDPR/CCPA if storing personal data).

💡 Use Case

Content teams, marketers, and researchers who need structured video metadata from a YouTube channel or playlist — without manually scrolling and copying data — to track uploads, monitor engagement, or build a dataset for analysis.

🏭 Industry

Media & Entertainment, Marketing & Advertising, Market Research, Content Creation.

📤 Output

Structured JSON dataset (exportable to CSV/Excel) containing per-video metadata: title, URL, channel, view count, duration, publish date, thumbnail, and optionally full description and keywords.

🌐 Domain

Social media / video platform data extraction (YouTube).

🏷️ Label

youtube, video-scraper, channel-scraper, playlist-scraper, social-media

✨ Features

• Video listing extraction — pulls videos from a channel's Videos tab, Shorts tab, channel root, or any playlist
• Pagination support — automatically pages through the full listing, not just the first page
• Proxy support — configurable proxy for listing requests, with automatic residential proxy routing for detail pages when enabled
• Optional detail enrichment — turn on scrapeDetails to fetch full description, exact view count, publish date, and video length per video
• Unique results across runs — set a project name to automatically skip videos already collected in a previous run under that name, so repeated runs only return new videos (disabled by default; leave the project name empty to fetch the full listing every run)

🔧 Input Configuration

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
startUrls	array	✅	—	YouTube channel (Videos or Shorts tab, or channel root) or playlist URLs to scrape.
maxItems	integer	—	5	Maximum number of videos to collect per start URL.
scrapeDetails	boolean	—	false	When enabled, visits each video's watch page for extra fields (description, exact view count, publish date). Increases run cost since these requests are routed through a residential proxy. When disabled, only data available on the list page is returned (faster, cheaper, no proxy needed).
projectName	string	—	—	Videos already scraped under this project name in a previous run are skipped on later runs, so repeated runs only collect new videos. Leave empty to disable caching.
proxyConfiguration	object	—	Residential proxy	Proxy settings for list-page (channel/playlist) requests.

Supported URL types:

• Channel Videos tab — https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown/videos
• Channel Shorts tab — https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown/shorts
• Channel root — https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown
• Playlist — https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=...

📦 Output

The actual fields returned depend on the scrapeDetails input — two dataset views are available to match.

Video list (scrapeDetails off — default)

Fields available directly from the channel/playlist listing page.

{
	"videoId": "ZpF6IE0rdxA",
	"title": "Antigravity A1: A New Take on Drones!",
	"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpF6IE0rdxA",
	"sourceUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd/videos",
	"channelName": "Marques Brownlee",
	"viewCountText": "2.2M views",
	"durationText": "10:09",
	"publishedTimeText": "3 weeks ago",
	"thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZpF6IE0rdxA/maxresdefault.jpg"
}

Video details (scrapeDetails on)

Adds fields only available on the video's watch page — full description, exact view count, ISO publish date, video length, and keywords.

{
	"videoId": "ZpF6IE0rdxA",
	"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpF6IE0rdxA",
	"sourceUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd/videos",
	"title": "Antigravity A1: A New Take on Drones!",
	"description": "Thanks Antigravity for sponsoring this video! Get 25% off the A1 at https://geni.us/lQlFcj for a limited time, and get 20% off accessories during Prime Day! Also, the first 25 people get a free flight battery and a double-lens replacement kit with their A1 purchase.\n\nMKBHD Merch: http://shop.MKBHD.com\n\nPlaylist of MKBHD Intro music: https://goo.gl/B3AWV5\n\n~\nhttp://twitter.com/MKBHD\nhttp://instagram.com/MKBHD\nhttp://facebook.com/MKBHD",
	"channelName": "Marques Brownlee",
	"channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ",
	"viewCount": "2204028",
	"publishDate": "2026-06-29T12:22:20-07:00",
	"lengthSeconds": "609",
	"keywords": [
		"Antigravity",
		"Antigravity A1",
		"A1 drone",
		"360 drone"
	],
	"thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZpF6IE0rdxA/maxresdefault.jpg"
}

💡 Uses of This Data

• Tracking a channel's upload frequency and content strategy over time
• Monitoring view count and engagement growth on new uploads
• Building a searchable archive of a channel's or playlist's video catalog
• Competitive research across multiple channels in the same niche
• Feeding video metadata into content recommendation or analytics pipelines

🚀 How to Use

1. Sign up for a free Apify account — includes $5 monthly credit.
2. Open the actor page and click Try for free.
3. Fill in the Input fields (start URL is required).
4. Click Start and wait for the run to complete.
5. Download results from the Output tab in JSON, CSV, or Excel format.

You can also run this actor via the Apify API or integrate it directly into your workflows using Zapier, Make, or n8n.

📝 Notes

• Proxy recommended for large-scale scraping — For high-volume runs, enable the Apify Residential or Datacenter proxy to avoid blocks.
• API integration — This actor can be called as an API from any automation platform (Zapier, Make, n8n, custom scripts).

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💬 Support & Contact

If you encounter any issues or have questions, please open an issue

You can also find more of my actors on the page Actor Flow .