YouTube Trending Scraper: the most-viewed videos on YouTube for any topic you name

Give it a list of topics and get back the videos with the highest view counts for each one: title, channel, view count, age, duration, thumbnail and the watch URL. No account, no API key, no quota.

Read this before you buy, because the name promises something YouTube no longer offers. YouTube retired the standalone Trending feed, so there is nothing left to read. What this does instead is search each topic and sort by views, which means the ranking is all-time, not this week. Ask it for "music" and the top of the list is a video with a hundred million views from three months ago, not the clip everyone is sharing today. If what you need is what is rising right now, this is the wrong purchase, however cheap it is.

Input	Topics or keywords, one per line
Output	One row per video
Ceiling	2,000 videos per run
Account needed	None from you
Price	$0.40 per 1,000 videos, flat on every plan

🔥 What YouTube Trending Scraper does

One search per topic, sorted by view count, paged until it has what you asked for or the topic runs out. Give it five topics and a limit of 100 and it works down the list, stopping the moment the total is reached, so put the topic you care about most first.

Numbers come back exactly as YouTube prints them, as text: 115,768,253 views, 3 months ago, 4:21. That is deliberate. YouTube never publishes a real timestamp on a search result, only a phrase, and parsing "3 months ago" into a date would be inventing precision that was never there. You get the string YouTube showed, and you decide what to do with it.

A video that appears under two of your topics is returned once and counted once.

📥 What you give it

{
  "keywords": ["music", "gaming", "ai"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Field	Default	What it is
keywords	none	One topic per line. Required: with an empty list the run stops on BAD_INPUT without collecting anything.
maxItems	50	Total videos across every topic, not per topic. Up to 2,000. This is what you pay for.
proxyConfiguration	Apify network on	The default is fine for YouTube. Leave it alone unless you have your own servers you want the traffic to leave through.
notionConnector	none	Optional. Deliver the rows to a Notion workspace you have connected to Apify.
notionParentId	none	The Notion database to write them into, when you use the connector.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run. The thumbnail link is cut short so the block stays readable:

{
  "ok": true,
  "videoId": "OQac93ARgQE",
  "title": "TUL8TE, Saint Levant - Nano I تووليت، ساينت ليفانت - نانو (Official Music Video)",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQac93ARgQE",
  "channelName": "TUL8TE",
  "channelId": "UC5a1OK2lI0Q2x2jyJSDyc7A",
  "viewCountText": "115,768,253 views",
  "publishedTimeText": "3 months ago",
  "lengthText": "4:21",
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OQac93ARgQE/hq720.jpg?sqp=...",
  "mode": "trending"
}

Field	What it is
videoId	The 11-character id. It survives a title change, so key on it rather than the URL.
viewCountText	What YouTube printed. On a live stream it reads N watching instead of a view count.
publishedTimeText	YouTube's own phrase, like 3 months ago. Empty on a live stream, which has not been published yet.
lengthText	Duration as shown, 4:21. Live streams have none.
channelId	The UC... id, or an empty string when the byline is a collaboration rather than one channel. Measured at 41 of 45 rows carrying an id on one run.
thumbnail	The largest still YouTube offered. Signed and time limited, so download what you want to keep.

🧾 Reading the output

Row	How to spot it	Billed
A video	ok: true with a videoId	yes
A diagnostic	ok: false with an errorCode and the topic it belongs to	no

A diagnostic row does not stop the run. The other topics carry on.

Code	What it means
BLOCKED	YouTube refused that request after the retries.
RATE_LIMITED	YouTube asked us to slow down. The run backs off and retries before giving up on a topic.
SERVER_ERROR	YouTube answered with an error of its own. Usually passes.
NOT_FOUND	The request came back 404.
NETWORK	The connection failed on the way to YouTube.
NO_RESULTS	The search worked and that topic had nothing to return.
BAD_INPUT	No topics were given, so there was nothing to search.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open YouTube Trending Scraper and click Try for free.
2. Type your topics into Topics / keywords, one per line, most important first.
3. Set Max videos low while you are testing, since that is what you pay for.
4. Click Start.
5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.40 per 1,000 videos. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per video returned, so the bill follows Max videos rather than how many topics you typed. A video found under two topics counts once. Diagnostic rows are not charged, and a topic that returns nothing adds nothing to the bill.

💡 What people use it for

• Sizing a niche before making anything: what does the top of this topic actually look like, and how big are the numbers.
• Finding the channels that own a subject, by grouping rows on channelName.
• Filling a content calendar with formats that already worked, rather than guesses.
• Building a watchlist: take the videoId values and feed them to a transcript or comment run.

🚧 What it does not do

• It is not this week's trending. The ranking is all-time views for the topic. YouTube retired the feed that would have answered the other question.
• No description, no like count, no comment count. The search payload does not carry them. Pull those separately if you need them.
• No dates. publishedTimeText is YouTube's phrase, not a timestamp, and nothing here turns one into the other.
• News-shaped topics come back full of live streams, which have N watching where the view count goes and no publish date or duration at all.
• A collaboration byline leaves channelId empty, because YouTube gives that row no single channel to point at. channelName still fills in.
• 2,000 videos per run, and maxItems counts across every topic together.
• If YouTube decides to answer a sorted request in relevance order anyway, the rows come back in that order and nothing on the row flags it.

🧭 Which YouTube actor do you need?

If you want	Use
The most-viewed videos for a topic	This one
A keyword search in YouTube's own order, or a channel's uploads	YouTube Scraper
Shorts from a channel or a keyword	YouTube Shorts Scraper
Only the new uploads from a watch list	YouTube Upload Monitor
The video, audio or subtitle file itself	YouTube Downloader Pro

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a YouTube API key? No. No key, no OAuth, no quota to manage.

Why is a three-month-old video at the top? Because the sort is total views, and an older video has had longer to collect them. That is what "most viewed for this topic" means here.

Can I get exact numbers instead of text? Not from this one. viewCountText carries the digits YouTube printed, so 115,768,253 views parses cleanly enough, but the age never will.

Does it cover a country or a language? Not as a setting. Phrase the topic in the language you want and you mostly get that language back.

Is scraping YouTube legal? This reads public search results, the same ones a signed-out visitor sees. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a reasonable starting point, and we are not lawyers.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes, though remember the ranking moves slowly. Weekly tells you more than hourly.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Include the topics you used and the run id. Any diagnostic rows in your dataset already name the reason.