YouTube Video & Channel Scraper

Public YouTube video and channel metadata in one unified, typed, null-safe dataset: search, channel video lists, playlists, single-video details, Shorts and trending. Give it a handle (@MrBeast), a channel URL, a search phrase, a playlist, or a video URL — it returns clean JSON rows with stable field names (videoId, viewCount, publishedAt, …) that map directly onto YouTube's own public Data API vocabulary. No API key, no login, no download.

Why this actor?

• One actor for the whole metadata surface — the incumbent splits search, channel, video, Shorts and playlist across four actors; this one covers all six modes with a single typed schema.
• Typed, null-safe flat rows — every row carries recordType, its stable id and scraped_at; absent optional fields are explicit null, never dropped rows or crashes. *Count fields are integers, not "1.6M" strings.
• Price at the floor — $0.0005 per record undercuts the leader's FREE-tier $0.004/video and matches the cheapest incumbent, for a superset of surfaces.
• API/MCP-ready — field names match YouTube's public Data API, so agentic and API consumers can map rows without re-learning a schema.
• No upstream cost — the public metadata surface needs no key and no per-video fee; you pay only for the delivered, typed rows.

Input

{
  "mode": "channel",
  "channel": "@MrBeast",
  "maxResults": 10,
  "sort": "latest",
  "includeShorts": false
}

mode is required (channel, search, playlist, video, shorts, trending); everything else defaults sensibly. maxResults (default 50, hard cap 100) is the total row budget and is enforced locally — for channel mode it includes the channel record, so maxResults: 1 returns the channel only.

Output

One row per public record; recordType discriminates video vs channel:

{
  "recordType": "video",
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "…",
  "channelId": "UC…",
  "channelName": "…",
  "publishedAt": "2009-10-25T06:57:33.000Z",
  "durationSeconds": 212,
  "viewCount": 1600000000,
  "likeCount": 17000000,
  "commentCount": 1300000,
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/hqdefault.jpg",
  "description": "…",
  "tags": ["…"],
  "error": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-15T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Channel rows carry handle, subscriberCount, videoCount and country instead of the video-only fields. Dataset views (videos, channels) split the two shapes for you.

Pricing

Pricing

Pay per event, and the platform usage is on us — the price you see is the price you pay, with no compute bill on top.

Event	Price	What one charge buys
Video or channel record	$0.0005	Charged once per delivered public video or channel record (one dataset row). Rows are charged only after they are pushed to the dataset; a missing/invalid mode, an unresolvable handle or id, an empty search, and an upstream bot-wall/5xx/timeout are free error items and never charged.
Actor Start	$0.002	One run, whatever it returns.

Higher Apify subscription tiers pay less on every event (Silver −20%, Gold −35%).

Use cases

• Channel audits — pull a channel's profile and its latest videos in one run.
• Search pipelines — keyword search over YouTube returned as typed rows.
• Single-video enrichment — resolve one URL to id, title, views, likes, comments, duration and tags.
• LLM/MCP tooling — clean, typed JSON with YouTube-native field names; no scraping or parsing the site yourself.

FAQ

Does this actor need an API key or login? No. It reads YouTube's public metadata surface; there is no upstream cost. (Reachability from datacenter IPs is gated on an on-platform probe before this actor goes live.)

How many rows can I get? Up to maxResults (default 50, hard cap 100). The cap is enforced locally before/instead of trusting upstream, so you are never billed for more than you asked for.

What is a "record" for billing? One dataset row — one video or one channel record. A channel enumeration returns the channel record plus its videos.

What happens when nothing matches? An empty search/playlist, an unresolvable handle, a missing mode, or an upstream bot-wall becomes a free error item with the message in the error field — never a charged empty success.

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This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google LLC. It reads only public video and channel metadata.