YouTube Latest Videos: No API Key, With View Counts

Recent videos from any YouTube channel or playlist, with live view counts, star ratings and full descriptions.

No Google Cloud project. No Data API key. No quota. No browser. No cookies.

Why that matters

Every other way to read YouTube programmatically costs you something:

• The YouTube Data API needs a Google Cloud project and gives you 10,000 quota units a day. A single channel listing costs ~100. It does not survive real use, and when it runs out your pipeline stops until midnight Pacific.
• A headless browser is slow, expensive per run, and breaks every time YouTube reshuffles its markup.

This reads the Atom feed YouTube has published per channel and per playlist for over a decade. It is public, it is stable, and it carries the view count.

What you paste

Any of these. Whatever is in your address bar will work:

@mkbhd
mkbhd
https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ
https://www.youtube.com/c/mkbhd
https://www.youtube.com/user/marquesbrownlee
UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbpi6ZahtOH6Blw3RGYpWkSByi_T7Rygb

What you get back

One row per video:

field	notes
title	as published
url	the watch link
videoId	YouTube's own id
publishedAt	ISO 8601 UTC
viewCount	live, at the moment of the run
likeRating	average out of 5
ratingCount	how many ratings that average is over
description	full text
thumbnailUrl	full-size image
channelName, channelId, channelUrl	who published it
requestedTarget, sourceType	what you asked for, so a row traces back

The limit, before you pay for it

A YouTube feed holds the 15 most recent videos per channel. There is no paging parameter and there is no sixteenth video.

This reads a channel's recent output. It cannot read a back catalogue, and no Actor reading this source can, whatever it says. If you need a full history, you need the Data API and its quota.

That is the whole trade: 15 recent videos, instantly, free of quota, versus a full catalogue behind a key that runs out.

Filters

Filtered videos are never returned and never charged.

• titleKeywords / titleExclude — plain text, case-insensitive
• minViews — a video whose view count YouTube has not published yet is excluded when this is set, because no count is not the same as zero
• publishedAfter — an ISO date
• maxVideosPerChannel — 15 is the ceiling, lower it to keep a trial cheap
• maxResults — hard ceiling across the whole run, 1,000 by default

Good for

• Watching competitors' channels for new uploads and how they perform
• Tracking a topic across a set of creators
• Feeding a newsletter, dashboard or alerting pipeline
• Measuring which of your own videos are still gaining views

Pricing

Pay per video returned. Nothing else: not the run, not filtered videos, not a channel that turns out to be empty.