Medium Articles Scraper

What does Medium Articles Scraper do?

Medium Articles Scraper extracts articles from Medium using Medium's public JSON API — no authentication required. Given a tag (e.g., "python", "ai", "programming") or an author username, it returns structured data for each article: title, URL, author, publication date, reading time, clap count, tags, and a preview snippet.

Unlike browser-based scrapers that load JavaScript and render pages, this Actor uses Medium's internal JSON feed endpoints. By sending an Accept: application/json header, Medium returns structured JSON instead of HTML, making the scraper faster, cheaper, and more reliable. Each run delivers clean, pre-formatted data straight to your Apify dataset where you can download it as JSON, CSV, HTML, or Excel — or pipe it into any API-connected tool.

Why use Medium Articles Scraper?

Medium hosts millions of articles across technology, data science, design, business, self-improvement, and hundreds of other topics. Its recommendations engine surfaces high-quality content daily, but accessing that content at scale — for research, analysis, content curation, or monitoring — requires automation.

Use cases:

• Content curation and newsletters — Automatically collect trending articles from your niche (e.g., "ai", "blockchain", "startups") every day and build a curated newsletter or digest without manual copy-pasting.
• Market and competitive intelligence — Monitor what authors in your industry are publishing. Track article topics, publishing frequency, and engagement (claps) to identify content gaps and understand what resonates with readers.
• Data science and NLP research — Gather a corpus of articles by topic for sentiment analysis, topic modeling, trend detection, or training language models. The structured output (title, tags, preview text) gives you clean data to work with.
• SEO and content strategy — Analyze which article structures, titles, and topics perform best in your domain. Use the data to inform your own content strategy, identify high-engagement topics, and study successful authors.
• Academic research — Collect articles on specific subjects for literature reviews, citation analysis, or sociological studies of online publishing trends.
• Personal knowledge base — Archive articles from your favorite authors or tags for offline reading, reference, or personal study.
• Social media and marketing — Find trending content in your industry to share on social media, identify influencers (authors with high clap counts), and track content themes over time.

How to use Medium Articles Scraper

Using this Actor is straightforward. Follow these steps:

1. Open the Actor in Apify Console. You'll see the Input tab with a form.
2. Configure the input:
   • Enter a tag such as "python", "machine-learning", or "design" to fetch trending or latest articles in that topic.
   • Optionally enter a username (without the @ symbol) to fetch articles by a specific author.
   • Choose sort order: "trending" (top recommended articles) or "newest" (latest published).
   • Set max results to limit the number of articles returned (up to 100).
3. Run the Actor. The scraper will call Medium's JSON API, parse the response, and push each article as a dataset item.
4. Download results from the dataset tab. You can export as JSON, CSV, HTML, or Excel.

You can also run it programmatically via Apify API — useful for scheduled runs or integration into larger data pipelines.

Input

The Actor accepts the following input parameters. Configure them in the Input tab before running.

Field	Type	Default	Description
tag	string	"programming"	Medium tag to search (e.g., "python", "ai", "javascript"). Optional if username is provided.
username	string	—	Medium username to fetch articles by a specific author (without @). Optional if tag is provided.
sort	string	"trending"	Sort order: "trending" (recommended) or "newest" (latest).
max_results	integer	25	Maximum articles to return (1–100).

Output

Each article is stored as an item in the default dataset. Here's an example of a single result:

{
  "title": "10 Python Libraries Every Developer Should Know",
  "url": "https://medium.com/@pythoncoder/10-python-libraries-every-developer-should-know-abc123def456",
  "subtitle": "A curated list of essential Python libraries for 2025",
  "author": "Python Coder",
  "author_url": "https://medium.com/@pythoncoder",
  "published_at": "2025-06-15T08:30:00+00:00",
  "reading_time_minutes": 8,
  "claps": 1420,
  "tags": ["python", "programming", "data-science"],
  "preview_text": "A curated list of essential Python libraries for 2025"
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel from the Dataset tab after each run.

Data table

Field	Type	Description
title	string	Article title
url	string	Full medium.com URL
subtitle	string | null	Subtitle or brief description
author	string	Author's display name
author_url	string	Link to author's Medium profile
published_at	string	ISO 8601 publication timestamp
reading_time_minutes	integer	Estimated reading time in minutes
claps	integer | null	Number of claps (likes)
tags	array of strings	Article tags/categories
preview_text	string	First 200 characters of the subtitle

Pricing / Cost estimation

This Actor uses Pay Per Event (PPE) pricing:

• First 10 results per run are free. No charge.
• Beyond 10 results, each additional result costs $0.003 (charged via apify-actor-start and result events).
• Starting a run costs $0.00005 (apify-actor-start event).

A typical run with 25 articles would cost approximately $0.00005 (start) + 15 × $0.003 (15 chargeable results) = $0.045. For 100 articles: $0.00005 + 90 × $0.003 = $0.27.

Tips and Advanced options

• Use specific tags for better results. "machine-learning" returns more focused articles than "ML" or "AI".
• Keep max_results at 25 or lower for quick exploratory runs, then increase for production batch runs.
• Combine with other Apify Actors — pipe the output dataset into an NLP Actor for text analysis, or into a Google Sheets integration for live dashboards.
• Schedule regular runs via Apify Console to monitor trending content in your niche daily.

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

Q: Is authentication required?
No. This Actor uses Medium's public JSON endpoints which do not require API keys or login.

Q: Can I scrape paywalled article content?
This Actor extracts metadata only — title, URL, author, claps, etc. It does not bypass paywalls or extract full article text behind the paywall.

Q: Is this against Medium's Terms of Service?
This Actor accesses publicly available data from Medium's public feeds. You should review Medium's Terms of Service and use the tool responsibly. Do not republish scraped content without permission.

Q: Why use JSON API instead of a browser?
Medium returns JSON data when you set Accept: application/json on certain URLs. This is significantly faster and cheaper than running a full browser (Playwright/Puppeteer) — no JavaScript rendering overhead, no memory spikes, and no complex selector maintenance.

Known limitations:

• Medium may rate-limit requests from certain IP ranges. Running on Apify's platform with proxy rotation provides the best reliability.
• The JSON API endpoints are not officially documented and may change. This Actor is maintained to adapt to any changes.

Need help or have feedback? Open an issue on the GitHub repository or contact the author. Custom scrapers, integrations, and enterprise solutions are also available on request.