YouTube Shorts Scraper

What is YouTube Shorts Scraper?

YouTube Shorts Scraper extracts complete Shorts data from any public YouTube channel with exact numbers, ISO 8601 timestamps, and 37 fields per short — ready for spreadsheets, dashboards, and analysis pipelines.

Every number is an exact integer. Every date is ISO 8601. No "1.2M" guesses, no "10 months ago" approximations.

Data points extracted per short

Field	Description	Example
videoId	YouTube video ID	dQw4w9WgXcQ
title	Short title	Wait for it... #shorts
publishedAt	ISO 8601 upload timestamp	2026-03-15T14:30:00Z
viewCount	Exact view count	12500000
likeCount	Exact like count	890000
commentCount	Exact comment count	15420
duration	ISO 8601 duration	PT45S
durationSeconds	Duration in seconds	45
tags	Video tags	shorts,funny,viral
categoryId	YouTube category ID	24
categoryName	Human-readable category	Entertainment
definition	Video quality	hd
type	Video type	shorts
channelName	Channel display name	MrBeast
channelSubscriberCount	Exact subscriber count	464000000
channelIsVerified	Verification badge	true

37 fields per short. Every number exact. Every date ISO 8601.

Why use this scraper?

Our Actor vs Top YouTube Shorts Actors

Field	Us	Streamers
publishedAt ISO 8601 exact	✅	❌ relative
likeCount exact integer	✅	❌
commentCount exact integer	✅	❌
subscriberCount exact integer	✅	❌ abbreviated
tags	✅	❌
categoryId	✅	❌
topicDetails	✅	❌
definition (HD/SD)	✅	❌
hasCaptions	✅	❌
isAgeRestricted	✅	❌
durationSeconds integer	✅	❌
Bulk channels	✅	✅
Date filter	✅	✅
Price per 1,000	$0.50	$4.00

• One row, full picture — 37 fields per short, flat CSV. No second API call, no post-processing to parse "1.2K" into a number. Download, open in Excel, done.
• Incremental delivery — Results appear in your dataset within seconds. Export anytime, don't wait for the run to finish.
• From $0.50 per 1,000 items — Volume discounts down to $0.25 on Business plan. 8x cheaper than Streamers ($4.00/1K).

Use cases

• Shorts trend analysis — Track which Shorts go viral, when they're posted, and what tags and categories drive views. Identify patterns across channels and niches.
• Content strategy — Analyze top-performing Shorts by views, likes, and engagement ratios. Find the optimal length, best posting times, and winning hashtags for your vertical.
• Influencer discovery — Find creators producing high-engagement Shorts in your niche. Filter by subscriber count, posting frequency, verified status, and content category.
• Competitive intelligence — Monitor competitor Shorts: what they post, how often, what tags they use, which Shorts get the most engagement. Run weekly on a schedule.
• Market research — Benchmark channels by Shorts output, engagement rates, and content mix. Build datasets for reports and presentations with exact numbers.
• ML training data — Structured JSON with 37 fields per short, ready for recommendation systems, trend analysis, or content classification.

How much does it cost?

Each short counts as one item.

Plan	Price per 1,000 items
Free	$0.50
Starter	$0.45
Scale	$0.40
Business	$0.25

Scenario	Items	Cost
1 channel, 100 shorts	100	$0.05
10 channels, 100 shorts each	1,000	$0.50
50 channels, 200 shorts each	10,000	$5.00
1 channel, full history (2,000 shorts)	2,000	$1.00

Apify also charges a small compute cost (CU) for the actor's runtime — typically under $0.01 for most runs.

Input

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
channelUrls	string[]	required	YouTube channel URLs, handles (@MrBeast), or channel IDs (UC...). Supports /channel/, /@, /c/, /user/ formats.
maxShorts	integer	100	Maximum Shorts to fetch per channel.
sortBy	string	latest	latest, popular, or oldest.
oldestVideoDate	string	—	Only include Shorts published after this date (ISO 8601, e.g. 2025-01-01).
includeChannelInfo	boolean	true	Attach channel metadata (subscribers, description, country) to each Short row. Disable to reduce output size.

Output example

Each item in the dataset is a single short:

{
  "videoId": "abc123XYZ_0",
  "title": "Wait for it... #shorts",
  "description": "You won't believe what happens next...",
  "descriptionLinks": "",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/abc123XYZ_0/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-15T14:30:00Z",
  "duration": "PT45S",
  "durationSeconds": 45,
  "viewCount": 12500000,
  "likeCount": 890000,
  "commentCount": 15420,
  "tags": "shorts,funny,viral",
  "categoryId": 24,
  "categoryName": "Entertainment",
  "topicDetails": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment",
  "definition": "hd",
  "hasCaptions": false,
  "isAgeRestricted": false,
  "privacyStatus": "public",
  "commentsTurnedOff": false,
  "hashtags": "#shorts #funny",
  "type": "shorts",
  "order": 0,
  "channelId": "UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA",
  "channelName": "MrBeast",
  "channelUsername": "@MrBeast",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA",
  "channelDescription": "SUBSCRIBE FOR A COOKIE!...",
  "channelCountry": "US",
  "channelJoinedAt": "2012-02-20T00:43:50Z",
  "channelSubscriberCount": 464000000,
  "channelTotalViews": 109144471886,
  "channelTotalVideos": 942,
  "channelAvatarUrl": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/...",
  "channelBannerUrl": "https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/...",
  "channelIsVerified": true,
  "scrapeTimestamp": "2026-04-02T12:00:00Z"
}

Download your results as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or HTML from the dataset tab, or access them via the Apify API.

Good to know

Subscriber counts are exact integers. Other scrapers return abbreviated text like "1.2M" that you have to parse. We return 1200000 — ready for calculations, sorting, and filtering.

Channel info is repeated on every row. This makes every CSV row self-contained. If you're scraping 50 channels and need to group by subscriber count, it's already there. Disable includeChannelInfo to reduce output size if you don't need it.

Shorts only. This actor fetches only Shorts (videos under 60 seconds). For regular videos, use YouTube Channel Scraper. For both videos and Shorts together, use the channel scraper with maxShorts set above 0.

Integrations

Connect this actor to your workflow with Apify integrations:

• Make (Integromat) — trigger workflows when new data is available
• Zapier — push shorts to Google Sheets, Slack, or databases
• GitHub — store results in repositories
• Google Drive — export directly to spreadsheets
• Webhooks — notify your API when the run completes
• Apify API — programmatic access for custom pipelines

Legal and personal data

This actor extracts publicly available data from YouTube. You should ensure your use of the extracted data complies with YouTube's Terms of Service, applicable data protection laws (GDPR, CCPA), and your jurisdiction's regulations regarding web scraping and data processing.

Channel and video information is public content visible to anyone on YouTube.

Support

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on the Issues tab or contact us through Apify messaging.