YouTube Video Scraper: search, channel videos, and video details

Scrape YouTube without an API key, without a login, and without quotas. Give it keywords, channel handles, video URLs, or all three in one run. Every video comes back as one clean row with title, channel, views, duration, publish date, description, and thumbnail.

Priced at $0.43 per 1,000 results, which is the cheapest listed YouTube video scraper on Apify Store.

What it does

Three jobs in one actor:

Keyword search. Pass any number of search terms. Results paginate past the first page using YouTube's own continuation tokens, so a single query can return thousands of videos. Sort by relevance, upload date, view count, or rating, and narrow to the last hour, day, week, month, or year.

Channel videos. Pass a handle like @mkbhd, a channel id like UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ, or any channel URL. Reads the Videos, Shorts, or Live streams tab and pages through the channel's back catalogue.

Single videos. Pass watch URLs, youtu.be links, Shorts links, or bare 11-character video IDs. These always come back with the full record: exact view count, like count, complete description, keyword tags, category, and the channel's subscriber count.

Turn on Fetch full details for every video to get that same full record for search and channel results too. It costs one extra request per video, so it is off by default.

Output fields

Field	Description
videoId	11-character YouTube video id
title	Video title
url	Canonical watch URL
channelName	Channel display name
channelId	Channel id (UC...)
channelUrl	Canonical channel URL
channelSubscribers	Subscriber count, on detail records
viewCount	Views as an integer
viewCountText	Views exactly as YouTube shows them
likeCount	Likes as an integer, on detail records
duration	Runtime as mm:ss or h:mm:ss
durationSeconds	Runtime in seconds
publishedAt	ISO timestamp. Exact on detail records, estimated from "4 days ago" on list records
publishedTimeText	Publish date exactly as YouTube shows it
category	YouTube category, on detail records
keywords	Tag array, on detail records
description	Full description on detail records, snippet on search records
thumbnailUrl	Thumbnail image
isLive	Whether the video is or was a live stream
sourceType	search, channel, or video
sourceQuery	The query, channel, or URL this row came from
scrapedAt	ISO timestamp of the run

Input

{
  "searchQueries": ["python tutorial"],
  "channelUrls": ["@mkbhd"],
  "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
  "maxItems": 50,
  "sortBy": "relevance",
  "uploadDate": "any",
  "channelTab": "videos",
  "fetchVideoDetails": false,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

maxItems applies per search query and per channel, not to the run as a whole. Leaving every list empty runs the default search so you always get a non-empty dataset.

What people use it for

Creator research and influencer discovery, competitor channel tracking, content-gap analysis for SEO, building video datasets for machine learning, monitoring how a brand or product is covered, and pulling trending topics on a schedule.

Pricing

Pay per event. You pay $0.43 per 1,000 results plus a small actor start fee, and nothing for platform usage. No monthly fee and no rental.

Notes

Reads only public YouTube pages. Nothing is scraped from behind a login, and no captcha is solved. Keep Apify Proxy enabled so requests are not rate limited. Source code is open on the actor page.