YouTube Shorts Scraper | Shorts Data: Views, Likes, Publish Dates

Get YouTube Shorts data without an API key or quota units. Paste a channel handle and get every Short it lists, or paste individual Shorts links and get full details for each one: exact views, likes, publish date, duration, description, keywords and category. Export as JSON, CSV or Excel, or send it to Google Sheets, Make, n8n or Zapier.

It reads YouTube's public pages and the same internal "innertube" API the YouTube web player uses. No login, no browser, no cookies on your side. $0.0005 per Short ($0.50 per 1,000) plus a $0.0035 start fee per run.

What can you do with YouTube Shorts data?

• Benchmark YouTube Shorts performance. Export a creator's Shorts with exact view counts, likes and publish dates, then sort by views to see which topics and formats work.
• Compare competitor and creator channels. Put several channels in one run and compare how their Shorts perform side by side.
• Track new YouTube Shorts from competitors. Turn on incremental mode and each scheduled run returns only the Shorts published since the last run. Old Shorts are not re-fetched or billed again.
• Look up specific Shorts. Paste youtube.com/shorts/... links, normal video links or bare 11-character ids and get full details for each.
• Build a Shorts dataset for analysis or AI. One flat row per Short, ready for spreadsheets, dashboards, BI tools or LLM pipelines.
• Vet creators for sponsorships. Check how a creator's recent Shorts actually perform before you reach out.

Ready-made versions of these jobs are available as saved tasks on this Actor's page: channel Shorts, details by URL, creator comparison and a quick list.

Input

Field	What it does
channels	Channels to list Shorts from: a handle (@MrBeast), a channel URL, a /shorts URL or a UC... channel id.
shortsUrls	Individual Shorts: a youtube.com/shorts/<id> URL, any YouTube video URL or a bare 11-character id.
includeDetails	On by default. Looks up each channel Short for likes, exact views, publish date, duration, description, keywords and category. Same price per row either way.
mode	all (default) or changes. changes is incremental mode: only Shorts new since your last run of that channel. Channels only.
maxItems	Cost cap: the maximum number of Short rows for the whole run, shared across all channels and URLs. Channels are processed in the order you list them, so the first channel can use up the whole cap. For several channels, set it high enough to cover all of them.
maxPagesPerSource	How many pages of 48 Shorts to follow per channel. Default 10.
firstRunSince	How far back a channel's first incremental run looks, for example 30 days (default) or all. Needs includeDetails on, because only the detail lookup carries the publish date.
maxRetries	Retries with backoff for network errors, HTTP 429 and 5xx responses.
stateStoreName, stateNamespace	Optional: where incremental mode keeps its per-channel marks.

Input example

{
  "channels": ["@mkbhd"],
  "includeDetails": true,
  "maxItems": 20,
  "maxPagesPerSource": 1
}

Output

One row per Short. A real row from a channel run (thumbnail link shortened):

{
  "kind": "short",
  "mode": "channel-shorts",
  "videoId": "R6yNUnRXZ64",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R6yNUnRXZ64",
  "title": "iPhone Duo is here",
  "description": "What to know about iPhone Duo",
  "channelTitle": "Marques Brownlee",
  "channelHandle": "mkbhd",
  "viewCount": 8428642,
  "likeCount": 216514,
  "lengthSeconds": 70,
  "publishDate": "2026-09-10T00:02:22-07:00",
  "category": "Science & Technology",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/R6yNUnRXZ64/maxresdefault.jpg?...",
  "detailsFetched": true
}

Other fields: watchUrl, keywords, channelId, channelUrl, uploadDate, viewCountText and sourceChannelHandle.

What "details" means, honestly

A channel's Shorts tab only carries each Short's id, title, a rounded view count (such as "16M views") and a thumbnail. Likes, exact views, publish date, duration, description, keywords and category come from a second lookup per Short, which this Actor makes through Apify's datacenter proxy with a fresh IP per attempt, at no extra price. YouTube sometimes refuses those lookups, so the Actor retries failed ones in a second pass. In our original testing about 95% of Shorts came back with full details; in test runs on 2026-10-21, after the retry pass was added, 15 to 18 of every 20 did (roughly 75% to 90%), so expect a share of rows without details. The rest are still returned from the channel tab with title, link, thumbnail and rounded views, and detailsFetched is false on those rows. They are billed at the same price per row. If you look up Shorts by URL and YouTube refuses the lookup, that Short is skipped and not charged.

Incremental mode: track new Shorts

Set mode to changes. A channel's Shorts tab is newest-first, so each run stops as soon as it reaches a Short it has already returned. The first run seeds from firstRunSince (default 30 days back). A remembered set of Short ids guarantees the same Short is never billed twice. Marks are kept per channel in a key-value store in your own account. Schedule it daily or weekly and you get a feed of new Shorts only.

Pricing

Event	Price
Actor start (once per run)	$0.0035
Short scraped	$0.0005 per row ($0.50 per 1,000)

The price per row is the same with or without details, and the same for channel Shorts and URL lookups.

Worked examples:

• 20 Shorts: $0.0035 + 20 x $0.0005 = $0.0135
• 100 Shorts: $0.0535
• 1,000 Shorts: $0.5035
• 10,000 Shorts: $5.0035

maxItems is a hard cap on the number of billed rows, so a run can never cost more than the start fee plus maxItems x $0.0005.

Integrations and scheduling

• Apify Schedules: run it daily or weekly. With incremental mode, each run returns only new Shorts.
• Google Sheets, Make, n8n, Zapier: every run can push its dataset to your tools, for example by webhook when the run succeeds.
• API: start runs and read the dataset over the Apify API, or use the Apify client for JavaScript or Python.
• MCP and AI agents: call it from AI agents through Apify's MCP server.

FAQ

Is this a YouTube Shorts API alternative?

For reading public data, yes. It gives you views, likes, publish dates and durations for Shorts without a Google Cloud project, an API key or quota units. It does not write anything or touch your own channel, and it can only see what is public.

Does it download Shorts videos?

No. It returns data about Shorts (title, views, likes, dates, duration, thumbnail link), not the video files.

Can I get comments or transcripts for a Short?

Not from this Actor. Use YouTube Comments Scraper for comments and YouTube Transcript Scraper for transcripts.

Why do some rows have no likes or publish date?

YouTube refused the detail lookup for that Short. See "What details means, honestly" above. Those rows keep the title, link, thumbnail and rounded views.

Will YouTube block it?

YouTube can change or restrict access at any time. Requests are retried with backoff, and detail lookups are retried on fresh proxy IPs.

Is it legal?

It reads public pages only: no login, no private data. You are responsible for using the data in line with YouTube's Terms of Service and privacy laws such as GDPR.

Related Actors

• YouTube Scraper & API Alternative: channel videos, search results and comments in one Actor.
• YouTube Channel Scraper: subscribers, total views, join date, country and a channel's video list.
• YouTube Comments Scraper: comments and reply threads from any video.
• YouTube Transcript Scraper: video to text with timestamps.
• YouTube Shorts Scraper by streamers: a third-party alternative from another developer.