YouTube Scraper & Monitor ($0.50/1K)

YouTube Scraper & Monitor

Scrape YouTube search results, channels, Shorts, live streams, playlists and single videos: exact views, likes, comment count, publish date, length, tags, hashtags, full description and the channel's subscribers. Add transcripts and comments to the same rows. No YouTube account, API key or quota. $0.50 per 1,000 videos.

Turn on monitor mode and schedule it to get only the videos that are new since the last run, from any channel, search or playlist. It can post them straight to Slack or Discord.

What you get

For every video:

Field	Example
Title, URL and video ID	Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up, dQw4w9WgXcQ
Type	video, short, live or upcoming
Exact views	1,835,400,991
Exact likes	19,497,348
Comment count	2,461,569
Publish date, and whether it premiered or streamed	2009-10-24, uploaded
Length	213 seconds, 3:33
Full description	the whole text, links included
Tags and hashtags	rick astley, never gonna give you up; #OfficialMusicVideo
Channel name, ID, @handle, link and verified check	Rick Astley, @RickAstleyYT
Channel subscribers	4,560,000
Thumbnail and badges	image URL; CC, 4K
Where it came from	the search term, channel tab or playlist, and its rank there

Transcripts (add-on): the captions as plain text, in the language you pick. The creator's own captions are used when there are some, otherwise YouTube's auto-generated ones. Choose plain text, timestamped lines, or a ready SRT or WebVTT file. Each row says which language you got, whether it was auto-generated, and which other languages the video has.

Comments (add-on): top or newest comments with text, likes, reply count, when they were posted, whether they're pinned or edited, and whether the channel owner wrote them. Commenters' names and channels aren't collected.

Ready-made examples

Open one, change the input to yours, and run it:

• YouTube transcript scraper
• YouTube channel video scraper
• YouTube search scraper with filters
• YouTube comments scraper
• YouTube new video alerts

How to use it

Search YouTube

{
  "searchQueries": ["home espresso machine review", "budget espresso machine"],
  "maxResults": 50,
  "uploadDate": "month",
  "duration": "between4and20",
  "features": ["subtitles"]
}

YouTube's own filters are there: sort by relevance or view count, upload date (last hour to this year), length, Shorts only, and features like subtitles, 4K, HDR, live and Creative Commons. A search results link you copied from YouTube keeps the filters in it.

Channels

Paste channel links in any format: youtube.com/@mkbhd, /channel/UC..., /c/..., /user/..., or just @mkbhd. Videos come newest first. Pick the Videos, Shorts and Live streams tabs, or link one tab directly (youtube.com/@mkbhd/shorts).

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd" }, { "url": "@LinusTechTips" }],
  "channelTabs": ["videos", "shorts"],
  "maxResults": 100,
  "postedAfter": "30 days"
}

Playlists and single videos

Playlist links and video, Shorts and live links (watch, youtu.be, /shorts/, /live/, /embed/) work in the same list. A video you link that's removed or private comes back as a row with status not-found and the reason, free.

Transcripts for a list of videos

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" },
    { "url": "https://youtu.be/PmsWH7xlTCw" }
  ],
  "includeTranscript": true,
  "transcriptLanguages": ["en", "es"],
  "transcriptFormat": "timestamped"
}

Works on channels, playlists and searches too: get every new video's transcript from a channel, or transcripts for the top 100 results of a search. Ready for LLMs, RAG pipelines, summaries and content repurposing.

Filters

Checked before you're charged, on every search, channel and playlist. Videos that don't match are dropped for free.

• Posted after a date, or within a number of days. Channel tabs stop reading once they're past it.
• At least this many views.

Monitor mode: new videos only

Turn on Monitor mode and add a Schedule (e.g. every hour). The first run saves what each channel, search and playlist currently shows as the baseline and returns it. After that, each run returns only videos that are new, marked monitorStatus: "new".

• Channels: every new upload, Short or stream on the tabs you watch.
• Searches: new uploads that make the search's top results, not old videos that moved up the ranking. Set "Max videos per search" to how deep to watch.
• Playlists: videos added to the playlist.

Runs that find nothing new are free apart from the Actor start, so you can check often.

Alerts in Slack or Discord

Paste a Discord or Slack incoming webhook URL in Send new videos to a webhook. Each run posts its videos there with thumbnails, views, length and date. Any other URL gets the rows as JSON. In monitor mode the first run's baseline isn't sent, and quiet runs send nothing.

Coming from another YouTube scraper

Input from other YouTube scrapers works as is: searchQueries, startUrls, maxResults, maxResultsShorts, maxResultStreams, sortingOrder, dateFilter, lengthFilter, the is4K style feature switches, oldestPostDate, subtitlesLanguage and subtitlesFormat, and transcript inputs like youtube_url, channel and languages.

Pricing

Pay per result. Platform usage is included.

Event	Price
Video	$0.0005 ($0.50 per 1,000)
Transcript add-on, per video that gets one	$0.001 ($1 per 1,000)
Comment add-on, per comment	$0.0003 ($0.30 per 1,000)
Search, channel tab or playlist, once per run when it returns videos	$0.002

Video details (exact views, likes, date, description, tags, subscribers) are included in the video price.

You're never charged for:

• Videos, channels or playlists that weren't found or couldn't be read. They come back as rows with status and error.
• Videos your filters drop.
• Videos without captions, or whose transcript couldn't be read.
• The same video twice in one run.
• Monitor runs that find nothing new.

With a spending limit, the run stops at the limit and never goes over it.

Output

Results are in the run's dataset. Download them as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or get them through the Apify API, Make, Zapier or n8n. The dataset has views for videos, transcripts and comments.

Tips

• Leave Video details on unless you only need titles and links. Without it, views from channel and playlist pages are rounded (5.3M) and dates come from "2 weeks ago".
• For a search monitor that only alerts on fresh uploads, add Upload date: Today or This week.
• Very long videos have long transcripts. Timestamped lines make rows bigger; plain text is enough for most AI uses.
• Translated transcripts aren't supported. Pick the languages the video already has captions in (each row lists them in transcriptLanguagesAvailable).

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube account, API key or cookies? No. Everything comes from what YouTube shows to anyone without signing in, so there's no API quota either.

Is it legal to scrape YouTube? This Actor only reads public video, channel and caption data that YouTube shows to logged-out visitors. It doesn't collect commenters' names or any account data. Check the rules that apply to your use of the data.

Why does a video have no transcript? Some videos have no captions at all, often music videos and very new uploads. Those rows say transcriptStatus: "none" and aren't charged for a transcript.

Can I get every video of a channel? Yes. Set "Max videos per search, channel or playlist" to the channel's video count.