YouTube Comment Scraper

🚀 YouTube Comment Scraper is a high‑performance Apify Actor designed to extract unlimited comments from any YouTube video without using the official YouTube API. It leverages residential proxies, sorts comments by most recent, and delivers clean, structured data – perfect for sentiment analysis, market research, social listening, and content strategy.

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🔥 Key Features

• No API Key Required – scrapes public YouTube data directly, serving as a true YouTube API alternative for youtube comment downloader tasks.
• Smart Proxy Integration – uses Apify proxy residential to avoid IP blocks and achieve youtube rate limit bypass, ensuring reliable youtube data extraction.
• Recent Comments First – always retrieves comments in chronological order with youtube comment sort by recent, giving you the youtube comment newest first.
• Configurable Limits – set exactly how many comments you need (default 50) – ideal for any comment collector project.
• Comprehensive Fields – extracts comment text, youtube comment author, youtube comment votes, youtube comment likes, youtube comment replies, youtube comment threads, youtube comment timestamp, youtube comment id, and video ID.
• Automatic Video ID Parsing – works with both youtube.com/watch?v= and youtu.be/ URLs – a handy youtube video id extractor.
• Robust Error Handling – logs errors gracefully and notifies when comments are disabled.
• Apify Dataset Ready – each comment becomes a separate dataset item for easy export as youtube comment json, youtube comment csv, or youtube comment xml – a complete youtube comments dataset.
• Async Architecture – fast, non‑blocking async python scraper built with asyncio – perfect for no-api scraping at scale.
• Lightweight & Maintainable – built on the popular youtube_comment_downloader Python library, ensuring youtube comment downloader python compatibility.

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📋 How It Works

1. Input – Provide a YouTube video URL and optional limit.
2. Proxy – Actor initialises a residential proxy via Apify Proxy (recommended).
3. Scrape – Iterates over the comment generator, collecting data fields.
4. Output – Pushes each comment as a separate record to the Apify Dataset.
5. Finish – Logs total scraped comments and exits.

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📥 Input Schema

Field	Type	Default	Description
videoUrl	string	required	Full YouTube video URL (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123).
limit	integer	1000	Maximum number of comments to scrape (0 = unlimited).
useApifyProxy	boolean	true	Enable Apify Proxy – essential for YouTube scraping.
apifyProxyGroups	array	["RESIDENTIAL"]	Use residential IPs for best success rate.

Example input:

{
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jPQjjsBbIc",
  "limit": 1000,
  "useApifyProxy": true,
  "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
}

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📤 Output Format

Each dataset item corresponds to one YouTube comment:

Field	Type	Description
comment	string	Full text of the comment.
cid	string	Unique YouTube comment ID.
author	string	Display name of the commenter.
videoId	string	Extracted ID of the video.
voteCount	string	Number of likes the comment received.
replyCount	string	Number of direct replies (empty string if 0).
type	string	Always "comment" (future‑proof).
publishedAt	string	Relative time string (e.g., "3 hours ago").

If no comments exist (disabled or unavailable), a single item with a message field is pushed.

Example output item:

{
  "comment": "This tutorial saved my project!",
  "cid": "Ugw5qRz8xYp0Qvz7C2x4AaABAg",
  "author": "DevGuru",
  "videoId": "8jPQjjsBbIc",
  "voteCount": "127",
  "replyCount": "5",
  "type": "comment",
  "publishedAt": "15 minutes ago"
}

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🎯 Use Cases

• YouTube Sentiment Analysis – gauge public opinion on products, movies, or events.
• Competitor Research – see what audiences love/hate about rival YouTube channels.
• Influencer Marketing – analyse engagement on sponsored content.
• Academic Studies – collect large YouTube comment corpora for linguistics or sociology.
• Content Ideation – discover trending topics and viewer pain points.
• Brand Monitoring – track brand mentions across YouTube videos.
• Comment Moderation Training – build datasets for toxic comment classifiers.
• Social Media Analytics – integrate YouTube comments into dashboards.
• Video SEO – understand audience questions and improve content.
• Political Campaign Analysis – monitor public reaction to speeches or debates.

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🚀 Quick Start

1. Open in Apify Console – visit the Actor page and click Try for free.
2. Paste a YouTube URL in the input field.
3. Adjust limit (optional) and click Start.
4. Wait seconds – comments appear in the Dataset tab.
5. Export – download as JSON, CSV, HTML, or Excel.

You can also call this Actor programmatically via Apify SDK or REST API – ideal for automated pipelines.

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💎 Why Use This Actor?

Feature	Benefit
✅ No YouTube API quota	Scrape millions of comments without paying Google.
✅ Residential proxies	Bypass YouTube bot detection – high success rate.
✅ Recent‑first order	Get the freshest engagement, not old threads.
✅ Reply count included	Understand comment thread depth at a glance.
✅ Clean schema	Ready for immediate analysis or database ingestion.
✅ Apify ecosystem	Seamless integration with other Actors, triggers, and webhooks.

📦 Changelog

v1.0.0 (March 2025)

• Initial release with residential proxy support.
• Sorts comments by most recent.
• Extracts all core fields (text, author, votes, replies, time).
• Handles disabled comments gracefully.
• Full Apify Actor integration.

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🧑‍💻 Support & Feedback

• Issues & Ideas: Open a ticket on the Apify Actor issue tracker.
• Contributions: Pull requests are welcome via the GitHub repository.
• Documentation: Visit Apify Docs for platform guides.