YouTube Shorts Scraper — Channel Shorts, Views & Subscribers

Scrape every YouTube Short a channel has posted, without an API key. Give it an @handle, a channel URL or a UC channel id and get one row per Short — title, Shorts URL, video id, view count and thumbnail — newest first, with the channel's id, handle and subscriber count repeated on every row so a CSV export needs no join. Each channel also gets a free profile row: subscriber count, total video count, description, keywords, avatar and RSS feed.

No YouTube Data API quota, no login, no browser, no proxy.

Use it for short-form trend research, influencer vetting (which Shorts actually got views), competitor tracking, and building a Shorts list to feed a transcript or comments scraper.

Input

{
  "channels": ["@mkbhd", "https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast", "UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ"],
  "maxShortsPerChannel": 50,
  "maxChannels": 20
}

Field	What it does
channels	@handles, channel URLs (/@name, /channel/UC…, /c/…, /user/…) or bare UC… ids. A bare name without @ is treated as a handle. Duplicates removed.
maxShortsPerChannel	Newest-first cap per channel (default 50, up to 2,000). Also your cost cap: each Short row is one charged result.
maxChannels	Safety cap per run (default 20, up to 100).

Run it with no input and it scrapes the 50 newest Shorts from @mkbhd, so you can see the output before you spend anything meaningful.

Output

One charged row per Short:

{
  "type": "short",
  "position": 1,
  "videoId": "R6yNUnRXZ64",
  "title": "iPhone Duo is here",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R6yNUnRXZ64",
  "viewCountText": "6.8M views",
  "viewCount": 6800000,
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/R6yNUnRXZ64/frame0.jpg",
  "channelId": "UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ",
  "channelTitle": "Marques Brownlee",
  "channelHandle": "@mkbhd",
  "channelSubscriberCount": 21300000
}

One free channel row per channel with channelId, channelTitle, channelHandle, subscriberCount, videoCount, description, keywords, avatarUrl, rssUrl, shortsReturned and moreShortsAvailable.

A channel that cannot be read (wrong handle, terminated channel) comes back as a type: "error" row with a plain-English reason and is not charged.

Pricing

$0.0015 per Short row (pay per event, short-scraped). 1,000 Shorts = $1.50.

• The channel profile row is free.
• Channels that fail, do not exist, or have no public Shorts are free.
• The run stops cleanly at your spending limit rather than billing past it.

Limits

• What the channel's Shorts tab shows: title, id, URL, view count, thumbnail. YouTube does not put a publish date, duration, likes or comments on that surface, so this Actor does not invent them — pipe the URLs into our YouTube Comments Scraper or transcript Actor for more.
• View and subscriber counts are YouTube's rounded display values ("6.8M" → 6,800,000).
• Long-form uploads are not included — use our YouTube Channel Scraper for those.
• Uses YouTube's public web pages, so a layout change on YouTube's side can break it until we ship a fix. Every row says ok: true or carries an error — never a silent empty list.

FAQ

How do I download a list of all Shorts from a YouTube channel? Put the channel in channels, raise maxShortsPerChannel above the channel's Shorts count, and export the dataset as CSV or JSON.

How do I find a creator's most-viewed Shorts? Scrape the channel, then sort by viewCount.

Does it scrape Shorts search results or the Shorts feed? No — it reads the Shorts a given channel has posted. Bring the channels you care about.

Do I need proxies or an API key? No. It runs on plain Apify datacenter IPs.

Use from code or an AI agent

curl -s "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/EliAI~youtube-shorts-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"channels": ["@mkbhd"], "maxShortsPerChannel": 20}'

Agents: connect Apify MCP and call EliAI/youtube-shorts-scraper.

• Capability: list the Shorts a YouTube channel has posted, with view counts, without an API key
• Required input: channels (array of handles, URLs or UC ids)
• Returns: one channel row (free) and one short row per Short (charged)
• Bounded: maxShortsPerChannel ≤ 2,000, maxChannels ≤ 100
• Side effects: none — read-only

Changelog

• 2026-09-24 — First release: channel Shorts newest-first with view counts, handle/URL/UC-id input.