YouTube Comments Scraper — export YouTube comments to JSON

YouTube Comments Scraper for developers and AI pipelines — export comments from public YouTube videos as clean JSON (author, text, likes, reply count, timestamps, pinned flag), in bulk, with no API key.

YouTube throttles datacenter IPs and changes its comment endpoints often, so naive scrapers and free libraries break in production. This actor runs a hosted residential-proxy + retry layer, is actively maintained, and you only pay for comments actually delivered.

Built for developers and AI builders: sentiment analysis, audience research, content ideas, moderation datasets, and RAG/LLM ingestion of community discussion.

Run in 30 seconds

Paste this input and hit Start:

{
  "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw"],
  "maxComments": 100
}

Back comes one dataset item per comment:

{
  "videoId": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "videoTitle": "Me at the zoo",
  "channelName": "jawed",
  "commentId": "Ugzx...",
  "author": "@example-user",
  "text": "We're all watching history here.",
  "likeCount": "12K",
  "replyCount": 41,
  "publishedTime": "2 years ago",
  "isPinned": false,
  "authorChannelId": "UCxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
  "authorIsChannelOwner": false
}

Export as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the run's Storage tab.

What it does

Give it a list of YouTube video URLs or IDs and it returns the comments for each as structured JSON:

• author, authorChannelId, authorIsChannelOwner
• text (full comment)
• likeCount, replyCount, publishedTime
• isPinned
• videoId, videoTitle, channelName, url

Single videos or thousands in one run, up to thousands of comments per video.

Use cases

• Sentiment & audience analysis — feed comments to an LLM for themes, sentiment, FAQs.
• Content research — mine what viewers ask for across a channel.
• Moderation datasets — collect labeled examples of spam/toxicity.
• RAG / LLM ingestion — add community discussion to your knowledge base.

What you'll pay

$0.0004 per delivered comment. The math is plain:

Comments delivered	Cost
1	$0.0004
100	$0.04
1,000	$0.40

No subscription, no API key, no minimums. Videos with comments disabled, private, or unavailable are never charged.

Input

Field	Type	Description
videoUrls	array	Required. YouTube video URLs or IDs. Watch, youtu.be, shorts, and live URLs all work.
maxComments	integer	Max top-level comments per video. Default 100.
sortBy	string	top or newest. Default top. If YouTube does not expose newest-first ordering for a video, top order is used.
concurrency	integer	Videos in parallel (1–8). Default 3.
proxyCountryCode	string	Optional two-letter proxy country code (e.g. US).

Output

One dataset item per comment. Videos with comments disabled, private, or unavailable are written to a separate SKIPPED record (with the reason) and are never charged.

Use as an MCP tool / with AI agents

This actor is automatically exposed as an MCP tool, so AI agents can call it directly — no wrapper code:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=jamhimself/youtube-comments-scraper"
    }
  }
}

The endpoint is streamable HTTP (authenticate with your Apify token). Any MCP client — Claude, Cursor, or agent frameworks — can pass videoUrls and read the comments straight back from the dataset.

Why YouTube scrapers come back empty (and how this one avoids it)

YouTube serves bot-check and consent interstitials to suspicious traffic and throttles datacenter IPs. Naive scrapers parse those interstitial pages, find no comment section, and wrongly report "no comments" or "comments disabled". This actor detects bot-served pages instead of mislabeling them, retries on fresh sessions, and escalates to residential proxies automatically. It is actively maintained against YouTube's endpoint changes — and if a video still can't be fetched, it lands in the skipped list and you pay nothing.

FAQ

• Do I need a YouTube API key? No. No key, no quota, no OAuth.
• Replies? Top-level comments are returned now; threaded replies are coming in a later version.
• Comments disabled? Reported in the skipped list, not charged.
• Is this legal? It accesses publicly available comment data. You are responsible for complying with YouTube's Terms of Service and applicable law in your use of the output.

If this actor saved you time, an honest review helps others find it.

---

YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC. This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google. Built and maintained by Jamhimself LLC.