YouTube Channel Videos Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

A YouTube channel's /videos tab ships its first ~30 uploads inline in a ytInitialData blob, then hides the rest behind a continuation token buried in the page — the same token shape that moves every few WEB-client releases. We find that token wherever YouTube nests it this month with a generic recursive search, page through /youtubei/v1/browse for the rest, and turn every upload into one clean dataset row with title, views, duration, publish time, and the highest-resolution thumbnail.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so the target sees a browser, not Python.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when the target pushes back, we slow down instead of getting banned.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Competitor/content research — pull a competitor channel's full upload history to study cadence, titling, and view performance over time.
• Creator analytics — build per-channel dashboards of view counts and publish cadence without babysitting the YouTube UI.
• Video-inventory pipelines — feed a downstream catalog, recommender, or archive with a channel's canonical video list, IDs, and thumbnails.
• Trend tracking — snapshot a set of channels on a schedule to watch view-count growth and publishing frequency shift over time.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
channels	array	yes	['@mkbhd']	YouTube channel handles, bare handles, or full channel URLs (e.g. @mkbhd, mkbhd,…
maxVideos	integer	no	30	Stop paging once this many videos have been emitted for a single channel (1–5000). Set above ~30 to force a second…
hl	string	no	'en'	YouTube UI language passthrough — affects relative-timestamp text like "3 days ago". Example: en.
gl	string	no	'US'	YouTube UI country/region passthrough. Example: US.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': True}	Apify Proxy configuration. Recon confirmed byte-identical channel-page payloads across datacenter and residential exits…

Example input

{
  "channels": [
    "@mkbhd",
    "@veritasium"
  ],
  "maxVideos": 45,
  "hl": "en",
  "gl": "US",
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
channel_handle	string	Normalised @handle of the channel this video belongs to.
video_id	string	11-character YouTube video ID.
title	string	Video title at scrape time.
view_count	integer	Parsed view count. 0 when absent or unparseable.
published_time	string	YouTube's relative publish string (e.g. '3 days ago'), verbatim — no absolute-timestamp resolution.
duration_text	string	Verbatim duration text (e.g. '12:34'). Null for live streams/premieres.
duration_seconds	integer	Duration parsed to seconds. Null alongside duration_text for live/premiere videos.
thumbnail_url	string	Highest-resolution thumbnail URL available.

Example output

{
  "channel_handle": "@mkbhd",
  "video_id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "This Changes Everything",
  "view_count": 4213098,
  "published_time": "3 days ago",
  "duration_text": "12:34",
  "duration_seconds": 754,
  "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/hqdefault.jpg"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.2	One-off warm-up charge per run
video-scraped	$0.005	PPE event

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $5.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

Public channels only — the /videos tab, not Shorts or Live. No channel-metadata row (subscribers, banner, description) — video rows only. No absolute-timestamp resolution for publish dates. YouTube's internal payload shape can shift between web-client releases; we walk it with a generic recursive search rather than a fixed path, but a structural change may still need a same-day patch.

❓ FAQ

Does this scrape Shorts or Live tabs?

No — v1 covers the standard /videos tab only (regular uploads). Shorts and Live listings are out of scope for this release.

Does it return channel-level metadata like subscriber count?

No — this Actor returns video rows only, not a channel-metadata row (subscribers, banner, description).

Why is published_time a string like '3 days ago' instead of a date?

That's what YouTube's own channel page returns — it does not expose an absolute timestamp here. We pass it through verbatim rather than guessing at a conversion.

What happens if a channel has zero videos?

The run still succeeds — a legitimately empty channel returns zero rows for that channel and the final status message reports it separately from a failed/degraded fetch.

What happens if a channel handle is invalid or the channel is private?

That single channel is skipped and counted as failed in the run summary; every other channel in the same run still completes.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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