YouTube Channel Monitor — What a Channel Quietly Changed

Every other YouTube Actor sells you a snapshot: here is the channel as it looks today. This one sells the diff, and the diff holds facts a snapshot structurally cannot.

• A video disappeared. Deleted, made private, or pulled after a claim. YouTube keeps no public record of this — the video is simply not in the listing any more. Only somebody who saw it yesterday knows it existed.
• A video was retitled. Creators A/B-test titles and replace the ones that underperform. The new title is public. The old one is gone the second it changes.
• How fast views are moving. A snapshot gives a total. Two snapshots give a rate, which is the number that says whether something is actually working.

None of it can be bought back later. It accrues only to whoever was watching.

What it does well

• Deletion detection — the signal nothing else on this store reports.
• Retitle history — old title, new title, and how many times that video has been renamed since you started watching.
• View velocity — views gained and a per-day rate, normalised so a schedule that drifts does not distort it.
• First run is quiet by design — it records a baseline and reports nothing, so you are not billed for a channel's entire back catalogue as "news".
• Switch off what you do not want — anything not reported is not billed.

How it works

Run 1 records what is there. Every later run compares and reports the difference. History lives in a named key-value store so it survives between runs — see the note below, because getting that wrong turns a monitor into a slower channel scraper.

Input

{
  "channelUrls": ["@competitor-one", "@competitor-two"],
  "tab": "videos",
  "maxVideosPerChannel": 300,
  "watchDisappearances": true,
  "watchRetitles": true
}

Every option

The same wording you see in the Apify console, with the JSON key for API and MCP callers.

Option	What it does	Default
Channels to watch — channelUrls (required)	@handles, /channel/UC… URLs, or legacy /c/ and /user/ URLs. Each channel's history is tracked separately.	—
Which videos — tab	Long-form uploads, Shorts, past live streams, or everything. Each tab is its own history, so switching starts a fresh baseline.	"videos"
Max videos watched per channel — maxVideosPerChannel	How deep into the back catalogue to watch. A video outside this window looks like it disappeared — see the warning below.	200
Report videos that disappeared — watchDisappearances	Deleted, private, or pulled. The listing does not say which, and neither does the row.	true
Report retitled videos — watchRetitles	Carries both the old and the new title.	true
Report view movement — watchViewChanges	One row per video whose views moved. Off by default because almost every video moves.	false
Minimum views gained — minViewsGained	Only applies to view movement. 0 disables. Filtered rows are not billed.	0
Memory store name — memoryStoreName	Named store holding the history. Different names give independent watchlists.	"youtube-channel-state"
Reset memory — resetMemory	Discard the history and make this run a fresh baseline. It reports nothing.	false
Concurrency — concurrency	Channels watched in parallel.	3
Proxy — proxyConfiguration	Leave the default. Reads listing pages only, so it stays on cheap datacenter proxies.	{"useApifyProxy":true}

Output

One row per change.

{
  "event": "disappeared",
  "channelId": "UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ",
  "channelName": "Marques Brownlee",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ",
  "tab": "videos",
  "videoId": "wt4p2oalmRY",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt4p2oalmRY",
  "title": "The video that is no longer listed",
  "viewCount": 812004,
  "firstSeenAt": "2026-07-02T09:00:00.000Z",
  "lastSeenAt": "2026-08-19T09:00:00.000Z",
  "daysWatched": 48.0,
  "titleChanges": 2,
  "detectedAt": "2026-08-20T09:00:00.000Z"
}

Every field

You are billed per change delivered, so here is everything a row can contain.

On every row

Field	What it is
event	disappeared, retitled, published or views-changed.
channelId / channelName / channelUrl	The channel being watched.
tab	Which tab this history belongs to.
videoId / url	The video.
title	Its title now — or, on a disappeared row, the last title we saw.
detectedAt	When this run saw the change. The change itself happened between runs; YouTube publishes no timestamp for it.

On retitled

Field	What it is
previousTitle	What it was called before. This is the part that is gone from the public record the moment it changes.
titleChanges	How many times this video has been renamed since you started watching. A video on its fourth title is a video that is not working.
viewCount	Views at the time of the rename.

On views-changed

Field	What it is
viewCount / previousViewCount	Now, and at the previous run.
viewsGained	The difference.
viewsPerDay	That difference over the actual elapsed time — normalised, because a schedule does not land on exact intervals.
daysSinceLastSeen	How long the gap was.

On disappeared

Field	What it is
viewCount	The last view count we ever saw. Everything below is all that will ever be known about it, because the source is gone.
firstSeenAt / lastSeenAt	The window in which we saw it.
daysWatched	How long it survived under observation.
titleChanges	Whether it was being retitled before it went.

On published

Field	What it is
viewCount / durationSeconds / publishedText / isShort	The new video as first seen.

Two things that will bite you if nobody says them

The first run reports nothing, and that is correct. It records a baseline. If it reported the whole back catalogue as "published", you would pay for a channel scrape and call it news. Changes start from run two.

Set the video window larger than the channel. The monitor can only miss what it can see. If a channel has 400 videos and Max videos watched is 200, the 201st video is outside the window — and when the channel publishes something new, the oldest visible video falls out and is reported as disappeared when it is still perfectly public. Leave generous headroom, or watch a fixed window and accept the edge.

Why the memory is a named store

Tracking lives in a named key-value store, not the default one. Apify's default store is scoped to a single run: history kept there would be silently discarded every time, and every run would record a fresh baseline and report nothing forever. That is the failure mode this Actor is most exposed to, so it is pinned by name and covered by a test.

Use different memoryStoreName values for independent watchlists.

Who this is for

• Competitive intelligence teams — what a rival pulled down, and what they renamed after it underperformed. YouTube keeps no record of either.
• Brand safety owners — get told when a video you are referenced in disappears.
• Talent scouts — viewsPerDay finds a channel accelerating before its totals look impressive.
• Researchers — a permanent record of videos that no longer exist publicly.

Common uses

• Competitor intelligence — see what a rival pulled down, and what they renamed after it underperformed.
• Title testing research — titleChanges across a niche shows who is iterating and how hard.
• Brand safety — get told when a video you were referenced in disappears.
• Talent scouting — viewsPerDay finds a channel accelerating before its totals look impressive.
• Archival — a permanent record of videos that no longer exist publicly.

Pricing

Pay per change delivered. Reports you switched off, rows removed by your filters, and the entire first-run baseline cost nothing.

Starting a run costs $0.00002 — the platform's $0.00001 minimum, charged once per GB of memory, and these Actors run on 2 GB. That is two thousandths of a cent per run.

Watching is the expensive part and you are not charged for it: a quiet day on a channel that published nothing costs the run fee alone.

Other Actors in this family

Same engines, same billing, no account or API key on any of them.

YouTube & video

• Download YouTube Subtitles in Bulk — SRT, VTT & Text — Bulk subtitles from videos, channels or playlists — text, SRT, VTT or RAG chunks.
• Export YouTube Comments to CSV — Replies and Likes — Every comment and reply thread, with likes, authors and creator flags.
• List Every Video on a YouTube Channel — Export to CSV — A channel's whole back catalogue plus a subscriber and RSS summary row.
• Find YouTube Sponsors — Brand Deals, Codes & Links — Which brands pay which creators, with the campaign link, the code and the timestamp.
• YouTube Search API — Bulk Results, No Quota — Many search terms at once, every result as a row, filtered before you are billed.
• YouTube Creator Email Finder & Sponsor Lookup — A channel list into leads: the published email, audience bands, and who already sponsors them.
• Export a YouTube Playlist to CSV — Every Video — Any playlist as a table, with each video position in it.

Search demand

• AnswerThePublic Alternative — Autocomplete Keyword API — One seed into hundreds of real keywords from Google, YouTube and Amazon autocomplete.
• Google Trends API — Today's Trending Searches, No Key — Today's trending searches by country, with traffic bands and the news behind them.

E-commerce

• Export Any Shopify Store's Products to CSV or JSON — Any Shopify catalogue: variants, SKUs, live prices, stock, images, collections.
• New Shopify Product Alerts — Competitor Drop Tracker — Only what a store launched since the last run. Scanning is free.

Hiring

• Greenhouse, Lever & Ashby Job Scraper — No API Key — Paste a company domain, get its open roles from Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever or SmartRecruiters.
• Ghost Job Detector — Track Reposts, Closures & Edits — What changed on a careers page: opened, closed, quietly reposted, or a ghost job.

FAQ

Will I get blocked, or my account banned? There is no account to ban — no login, no cookies. It reads listing pages only, which is what makes daily monitoring cheap enough to be worth doing. YouTube signals throttling with an HTTP 200 and an error body rather than an error code, which is the trap that silently halves most scrapers' results; this one detects it by reason and rotates.

Is it legal to monitor a YouTube channel? It reads the same public listing pages a browser requests, with no login and nothing bypassed. What it adds is your own record of what changed between two public snapshots — data you created by watching. YouTube's Terms of Service are a separate contract question. Not legal advice.

Can it tell me why a video disappeared? No, and it does not guess. Deleted, set to private, and pulled after a claim look identical from the outside. The row says it is gone and when it was last seen.

How often should I run it? Daily is the sweet spot for deletions and retitles. Hourly rarely surfaces more and multiplies cost. For view velocity, match the interval to how fast the channel moves.

What if a run is interrupted? State is saved per channel as each one completes, so an interrupted run re-reads only the channels it had not finished.

How much does 1,000 changes cost? $2.00, plus $0.00002 for the run.

Can I export the results to Excel or Google Sheets? Yes. Every run's dataset downloads as CSV, Excel, JSON, XML or RSS from the Storage tab, or straight from the API.

Can I connect it to Zapier, Make or n8n? Yes — Apify publishes integrations for all three, plus webhooks that fire when a run finishes. A schedule here plus a webhook into Slack is the usual setup.

Do I need to write code? No. Fill the form in the console and press Start. It is also available over MCP so an AI agent can call it directly.