YouTube Channel Scraper | Rich Channel Info & Videos

An alternative YouTube Data API with no limits or quotas. Scrape one or many YouTube channels for rich channel info — subscribers, total views, creation date, country, verified badge, avatar/banner, external links — plus that channel's videos, paginated. No login, no API key sign-up, no browser, no proxy.

What you get

• Channel info (one row per channel): channel id, handle, title, description, subscriber count (exact number + raw text), total video count, total view count, join/creation date, country, verified badge, avatar url, banner url, canonical channel url, external links (website, socials).
• Channel videos: that channel's videos (title, view count, published time, duration, thumbnail), paginated past the first page via YouTube's own internal "innertube" API.
• Incremental mode: track one or many channels' videos over time. Each run after the first returns only videos published since the last run — no re-scraping, no re-paying for old videos.

Turn either mode off with scrapeChannelInfo / scrapeVideos if you only need one.

How this works (honestly)

YouTube's own pages embed the same JSON its front-end uses to render itself server-side. This Actor reads two channel surfaces:

1. /about — for channel info. Confirmed live: this page's ytInitialData already carries an "about" panel (aboutChannelRenderer) with total view count, join date, country and external links — none of which appear on the plain channel header. The header itself (shared with the /videos page) supplies the avatar, banner, and verified checkmark. A microformat block on the same page carries the subscriber count as an exact integer, used in preference to parsing the "21.3M subscribers" display text.
2. /videos — for the channel's video grid, plus YouTube's internal /youtubei/v1/browse endpoint for further pages via the page's own continuation token, anonymously.

No headless browser, no residential proxy, no login wall to fight — because there isn't one on either surface. That keeps this fast, reliable, and cheap, and that cost is passed on to you.

Incremental mode (channel videos)

Set mode: "changes". On a channel's first run, it seeds from firstRunSince (default 30 days back). Every run after that resumes from a per-channel high-water mark stored in a key-value store. Channel grids only expose a relative publish time ("12d ago", "2w ago", "1mo ago"), not an exact timestamp, so the mark uses that as an approximate cutoff; a remembered set of video ids is the real safety net that guarantees no video is ever billed twice, even right at the boundary. A run cut short by your budget still advances the mark safely. This only affects channel videos — the channel-info row is always fetched fresh.

Input at a glance

Field	Description
channels	Channels to scrape — a handle (@nasa), a full URL, or a UC... id, one per line.
scrapeChannelInfo	Emit the enriched channel-info row (default on).
scrapeVideos	Emit the channel's videos (default on).
mode	"all" (default) or "changes" (incremental) — videos only.
maxItems	Budget cap on billed video rows across all channels.
maxPagesPerSource	Cap on innertube pagination pages per channel.
firstRunSince	How far back a channel's first incremental run looks (e.g. "30 days").

Billing (pay-per-event)

Event	Price
Actor started	$0.002 — charged once per run, regardless of results
Channel scraped	$0.004 — one enriched metadata row per channel
Video scraped	$0.00015 — one row per channel video

Real-measured cost on Apify's own infrastructure is dominated by fixed per-run overhead (no browser, no proxy), so pricing is a flat per-event rate with no hidden per-GB or "with extra fields" tier — every row already includes everything this Actor can extract for it. The per-video price undercuts the market's cheapest volume tier for a plain video row, and the channel-info row is priced for the extra "/about" page fetch and enrichment behind it.