YouTube Scraper

Scrapes YouTube videos by keyword search, channel, playlist, or direct video URLs using Playwright. Returns raw video metadata including title, views, likes, duration, comments, subtitles, and channel info.

What it does

This Actor supports four scraping modes:

• Search — find videos by keywords with filters for upload date, content type, duration, and sort order
• Channel — scrape the latest videos from specific YouTube channels
• Playlist — extract all videos from YouTube playlists
• Video — scrape detailed data from specific video URLs, optionally including subtitles/captions and top comments

Each mode outputs structured video data to the Apify dataset, ready for analysis or integration.

Use cases

• Influencer discovery — find top channels and videos in any niche
• Video SEO research — analyse titles, descriptions, thumbnails, and engagement metrics
• Content gap analysis — compare your channel's performance against competitors
• Product review monitoring — track what reviewers are saying about your products on YouTube
• Transcript extraction — fetch video subtitles for content repurposing and analysis

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
mode	string	No	"search"	Scraping mode: "search", "channel", "playlist", or "video"
keywords	array	No	[]	Search keywords (search mode only)
searchMaxResults	integer	No	20	Max results per keyword (1–200)
searchUploadDate	string	No	—	Filter: "hour", "today", "week", "month", "year"
searchType	string	No	—	Filter: "video", "channel", "playlist", "movie"
searchDuration	string	No	—	Filter: "short" (< 4 min), "medium" (4–20 min), "long" (> 20 min)
searchSortBy	string	No	—	Sort: "relevance", "date", "viewCount", "rating"
channelUrls	array	No	[]	Channel URLs (channel mode only)
channelMaxVideos	integer	No	50	Max videos per channel (0–500)
playlistUrls	array	No	[]	Playlist URLs (playlist mode only)
playlistMaxItems	integer	No	200	Max items per playlist (1–1000)
videoUrls	array	No	[]	Video URLs (video mode only)
fetchSubtitles	boolean	No	true	Fetch subtitles/captions (video mode)
fetchComments	boolean	No	true	Fetch comments (video mode)
maxComments	integer	No	20	Max comments per video (1–100)
proxyConfiguration	object	No	No proxy	Proxy settings to avoid rate limiting

Example input (search mode)

{
  "mode": "search",
  "keywords": ["trending products", "viral gadgets 2025"],
  "searchMaxResults": 20,
  "searchUploadDate": "month",
  "searchSortBy": "viewCount"
}

Example input (channel mode)

{
  "mode": "channel",
  "channelUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast"],
  "channelMaxVideos": 50
}

Example input (video mode)

{
  "mode": "video",
  "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123xyz"],
  "fetchSubtitles": true,
  "fetchComments": true,
  "maxComments": 20
}

Output

Each video is pushed as a separate record to the Apify dataset.

Field	Type	Description
title	string	Video title
url	string	Full video URL
viewCount	number	Number of views
channelName	string	Channel name
date	string	Publish date
duration	string	Video duration (e.g. "12:34")
thumbnailUrl	string	Thumbnail image URL
likes	number	Number of likes

Example output

{
  "title": "10 Viral Products You NEED in 2025",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123xyz",
  "viewCount": 1250000,
  "channelName": "TrendFinder",
  "date": "2026-02-28",
  "duration": "12:34",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/abc123xyz/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "likes": 45200
}

How to run

On Apify Platform

1. Go to the Actor's page on Apify Console
2. Select your scraping mode and configure the relevant fields
3. Click Start and wait for the run to finish
4. Download results from the Dataset tab in JSON, CSV, or Excel format

Locally

$apify run

Deploy to Apify

apify login
apify push

Built with

• Apify SDK — actor framework and dataset management
• Playwright — browser automation for YouTube pages