YouTube Scraper — Search, Channels, Videos & Playlists

An all-in-one Actor for public YouTube data. No API key, no Google quota, no login, no cookies, no proxy required. Four modes over one flat output schema, so a search row, a channel row and a playlist item all land in the same dataset with a type field telling you what each one is.

Modes

Mode	Input field	What you get
search	searchQueries	Keyword search results, paginated — one row per video
videos	videoUrls	One row per resolvable exact video ID (an unavailable ID yields no row and is never charged): exact player detail (exact view/like counts, publish date, category, keywords) when YouTube serves the player, otherwise exact-ID list metadata
channel	channelUrls	A channel's Videos, Shorts and Live tabs, plus a channel summary row
playlist	playlistUrls	Every item of a playlist, in order, with its position

Handles (@name), /channel/UC…, /c/…, /user/…, youtu.be/…, /shorts/…, ?v=… and bare 11-character IDs are all accepted and normalised for you.

Pricing — pay per result, nothing else

There is no actor-start fee. You are charged only for rows actually delivered: every video, short, channel or playlistItem row costs 1 result unit.

A video that is unavailable, a channel that will not resolve, or a playlist that returns nothing emits no row and costs you nothing. Use maxItems to put a hard ceiling on any run.

Example input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQueries": ["python tutorial"],
  "maxItems": 25,
  "language": "en",
  "region": "US"
}

Every video of a channel's Shorts and Videos tabs:

{
  "mode": "channel",
  "channelUrls": ["@YouTube"],
  "channelTabs": ["videos", "shorts"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Output

Every row carries type, id, url, title and provenance (_mode, _source, _input, _language, _region). Depending on the type you also get channelId / channelName / channelUrl, durationSeconds / durationText, viewCount / viewCountText, likeCount, publishedAt / publishedText, category, keywords, thumbnailUrl and playlistId / playlistPosition.

Counts that YouTube publishes only as human text ("1.2M views") are parsed to an integer and kept verbatim, so you never have to guess how a number was rounded.

Notes and honest limits

• Only public data is read. Private, members-only, age-gated-login and region-blocked videos are skipped, not faked.
• Search and channel-tab list rows carry YouTube's own approximate view counts and relative publish text ("8 months ago").
• mode: "videos" returns one row for each resolvable ID you list, and every delivered row belongs to the exact ID you asked for. It returns YouTube's exact player fields (viewCount, likeCount, publishedAt, uploadedAt, category, keywords) when YouTube serves the player payload to the run's IP. When the player is refused — which is common from plain datacenter IPs — the row falls back to the same exact-ID list metadata as search (viewCountText, publishedText) and the exact-only fields are simply omitted rather than guessed. Either way the row is real data for the ID you asked for, never a substitute video.
• If a run resolves zero rows it exits non-zero instead of reporting an empty success, so a broken input never looks like a clean run.

This is an independent implementation built against public YouTube client behaviour. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from YouTube, Google, or any other Apify Actor.