YouTube Data Scraper

Fetch YouTube video metadata, run searches with real pagination, and pull channel details — in one actor.

Why this one returns data. YouTube blocks the datacenter address ranges that scraping platforms run on. A scraper calling YouTube directly from that infrastructure gets "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" rather than results, which is why so many actors in this category quietly return empty datasets. This one routes every request through a residential connection, so it gets the same responses a normal viewer would.

Three things in one actor

{
  "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
  "searchQueries": ["web scraping tutorial"],
  "channels": ["@mkbhd"],
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 100,
  "sortSearchBy": "views"
}

You can use any one of them on its own, or all three in a single run.

1. Video details

Full metadata for a specific video:

Field	Description
title · description	Video title and full description
channel · channelId · channelUrl	Uploader details
viewCount · durationSeconds	Statistics
keywords	The video's own tags — useful for SEO research
publishDate · uploadDate · category	Publication metadata
thumbnails	All available thumbnail URLs
availableCaptionLanguages	Every caption language the video offers
isLive · isFamilySafe	Flags

2. Search

Paginated search results, sortable by relevance, upload date, view count, or rating. Ask for 500 results and you get 500 — pagination is handled for you.

Each result includes videoId, title, channel, viewCount, durationText, publishedText, and thumbnail.

3. Channels

Channel identity and recent uploads: channelId, title, description, keywords, avatar, plus a list of recent videos with view counts and publish dates.

What the channel option does and does not cover

Be aware of this before you buy: the channel option returns a channel's recent uploads, not its entire back catalogue. For most channels that is roughly the latest 15 videos.

If you need a channel's full history, use searchQueries instead — search paginates deeply and will return hundreds of results.

This is stated plainly because a scraper that promises a full catalogue and delivers fifteen videos is worse than one that tells you the limit up front.

Pricing

Pay per result returned. A video detail counts as one result, each search result counts as one, and a channel counts as one. Failed lookups cost you nothing — they still appear in the dataset with an error field so nothing disappears silently.

What people use it for

• Competitor and market research — track what is being published in a niche
• SEO and keyword research — video keywords, titles, and view counts at scale
• Content discovery — find videos to summarise, transcribe, or reference
• Trend monitoring — sort by upload date to watch a topic in near real time
• Dataset building — structured YouTube metadata for analysis or AI pipelines

Pairs naturally with the YouTube Transcript Scraper: use this actor to find videos, then that one to read what was said in them.

Notes and limits

• Private, deleted, and age-restricted videos cannot be fetched.
• Subscriber counts are returned only when they can be read reliably; the field is null rather than a guessed number.
• Each item is fetched independently — one failure never aborts the run.
• This actor reads publicly available data only.

Support

Something not returning what you expect? Open an issue on the Issues tab with the input you used.