YouTube Channel Scraper & Upload Monitor (videos, views)

Scrape the latest videos of any YouTube channel — or a keyword search — as flat rows, with no API key, no quota and no login. Run it once for a snapshot, or on a schedule so you know the moment a channel uploads.

What you get

videoId, url, title, channelId, channelTitle, channelHandle, publishedText, publishedAt, viewsText, views, likes, lengthText, durationSeconds, isLive, isShort, category, keywords[], description, thumbnail, source, searchQuery, rank, scrapedAt ( only with includeDetails).

Example output

Real row from the example dataset (channel @NASA, includeDetails off):

Field	Example value
url	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOvyerl_0cE
title	Go/No-Go: NASA's Space Toilet Explained
channelTitle / channelHandle	NASA / @NASA
channelId	UCLA_DiR1FfKNvjuUpBHmylQ
views / viewsText	87000 / 87K views
publishedText	4 months ago
lengthText / durationSeconds	1:18 / 78
source / rank	channel / 1

Use cases

• Competitor tracking: pull every recent upload of a set of channels and compare view counts week over week.
• Upload alerting: monitor mode on a saved Task posts new videos to a webhook or Telegram as soon as they appear.
• Content research: search a keyword sorted by date, relevance or views and get the result page as a table.

How it works

1. Channels → the channel's Videos tab (or Shorts tab with includeShorts) is read from the public page, newest first, 30 per request, up to maxVideosPerChannel.
2. Searches → the first page of YouTube search results for each query, ordered by searchSort.
3. includeDetails → each watch page is opened for the exact view count, likes, ISO publish date, category and keywords (one extra request per video).
4. No proxy and no API key — these are the pages YouTube serves to any visitor.

Input

Field	Meaning	Default
channels	Handles, channel URLs or UC… ids, e.g. @NASA	["@NASA"]
searches	Keyword searches (first page, ~20 videos each)	empty
searchSort	date, relevance or views	date
maxVideosPerChannel	Videos per channel, newest first	60
includeShorts	Read the Shorts tab instead of Videos	false
includeDetails	Open each watch page for exact stats	false
maxItems	Stop after this many video rows	20
mode	scrape or monitor (only new/changed since last run)	scrape
monitorStateId, webhookUrl, telegramBotToken, telegramChatId	Monitor-mode state key and alert targets	empty

Pricing

Event	Price
result	$0.0005 per video ($0.50 per 1,000)
monitor-check	$0.005 per monitor run
change	$0.0005 per new/changed video

Charged only for videos actually pushed. No proxy needed.

Why this actor

• No YouTube Data API key and no quota to manage — nothing to register, nothing to run out of.
• No proxy cost: the public pages answer directly, so your bill is the result events plus compute.
• $0.50 per 1,000 videos, one of the cheaper rates for this kind of listing.
• Monitor mode with webhook and Telegram alerts on new uploads and view changes.
• A run that finds nothing pushes nothing and charges no result events; the run summary says why.

Limits

• Without includeDetails, views are as YouTube rounds them in listings (e.g. 68K) and dates are relative ("19h ago").
• Comments, transcripts and subscriber history are not included.
• Search returns the first page of results per query (~20 videos), not the full result set.

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube Data API key or a Google login? No. The actor reads the public channel and search pages, so there is no key to obtain and no quota to exhaust.

How do I get exact view counts and publish dates? Turn on includeDetails. That opens each video's watch page for the exact views, likes, ISO publishedAt, category and keywords, at the cost of one extra request per video.

What happens when there are no results? No rows are pushed and no result events are charged. The RUN_SUMMARY record in the run's key-value store carries emptyReason, so "the channel has no videos in that tab" is distinguishable from a block.

Changelog

• 0.1: initial release.

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