YouTube Video & Channel Scraper

Give it a video link or a channel handle, get structured JSON back. No API key, no OAuth, no login, no cookies, no quota to apply for. Point it at dQw4w9WgXcQ, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=…, @veritasium, or a UC… channel ID.

You are charged only for results that actually came back. A private, deleted, or region-blocked video produces an explanatory row and costs nothing.

Input	Video URLs / IDs (watch, Shorts, youtu.be, embed) and channel URLs / @handles / UC… IDs
Output	Video metadata + channel profiles, as separate rows
Price	$0.015 per video · $0.005 per channel — the same on every Apify plan
API key	Not needed. This does not use the YouTube Data API, so it does not consume your quota
Transcripts	Not supported. See What this Actor cannot do

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What you get

Videos

{
  "itemType": "video",
  "videoId": "aircAruvnKk",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
  "title": "But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1",
  "description": "Full text of the video description, not truncated.",
  "durationSeconds": 1120,
  "viewCount": 23951183,
  "likesLabel": "like this video along with 512,000 other people",
  "publishedAt": "2017-10-05T00:00:00-07:00",
  "channelId": "UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw",
  "channelName": "3Blue1Brown",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw",
  "channelSubscribersLabel": "7.4M subscribers",
  "keywords": ["neural networks", "deep learning", "machine learning"],
  "category": "Education",
  "isLive": false,
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aircAruvnKk/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "availableCaptions": [
    { "language": "en", "name": "English", "isAutoGenerated": false },
    { "language": "es", "name": "Spanish", "isAutoGenerated": false }
  ]
}

viewCount and durationSeconds are real numbers, not display strings — you can sort and filter on them without parsing "1.2M" first. likesLabel is a string on purpose: YouTube no longer exposes an exact like count to logged-out clients, and inventing a number from a rounded label would be making data up.

availableCaptions lists which caption tracks a video has, in which languages, and whether they are human-written or auto-generated. It does not include the caption text — see below.

Channels

Each channel you pass returns one profile row, plus the videos you asked for:

{
  "itemType": "channel",
  "channelId": "UCLA_DiR1FfKNvjuUpBHmylQ",
  "channelName": "NASA",
  "handle": "@NASA",
  "subscribersLabel": "15.1M subscribers",
  "videoCountLabel": "6.1K videos",
  "description": "NASA's mission is to explore the unknown in air and space…",
  "videosOnPage": 30
}

---

Input

{
  "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk", "dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
  "channelUrls": ["@veritasium", "https://www.youtube.com/@NASA"],
  "maxVideosPerChannel": 10,
  "includeChannelProfile": true,
  "maxItems": 0,
  "minViews": 100000,
  "minDurationSeconds": 60,
  "publishedAfter": "2026-01-01"
}

Option	Default	Notes
videoUrls	—	Watch, Shorts, youtu.be, embed, live links, or bare 11-character IDs
channelUrls	—	@handle, /channel/UC… URL, /c/…, /user/…, or a bare UC… ID
maxVideosPerChannel	10	Per channel, counting only videos that pass the filters. 0 returns channel profiles only
includeChannelProfile	true	One profile row per channel
maxItems	0	Hard cap on rows for the whole run — bounds your spend
minViews	0	Skip videos with fewer views
minDurationSeconds / maxDurationSeconds	0	Skip videos outside this length window — e.g. minDurationSeconds: 61 drops Shorts
publishedAfter	—	ISO date; videos published before it are skipped
titleContains	—	Keep only titles containing at least one of these, case-insensitive

maxVideosPerChannel applies per channel, in one run. Monitoring forty channels and taking the five newest videos from each is a single run, not forty.

Filtering by views, duration, date, title

The filters exist so you can pay for the videos you want and none of the others. Two things make that literally true rather than a figure of speech:

1. Videos that fail a filter are not delivered and not charged. They do not appear in the dataset; the run summary counts them under filteredOut.
2. Channel videos are screened before their page is fetched. A channel listing already shows each video's rounded view count, length, and relative age. Anything that cannot pass on those — "12K views" against minViews: 100000, a 0:42 clip against minDurationSeconds: 60 — is dropped without loading its page, which is the expensive part. The screen is deliberately conservative: a rounded label is read at its upper bound, a relative date at its most recent possible value, and anything unparsable is let through. The exact fields are checked again once the page is loaded, so nothing that should have been excluded slips in.

Videos you pass directly in videoUrls are fetched and then checked on their real fields.

What the filters cannot do: a channel page lists roughly its 30 most recent uploads, and this Actor does not page further back. If fewer than maxVideosPerChannel of those pass your filters, you get fewer, and the log says so. publishedAfter narrows which of the listed videos you get; it does not reach older ones.

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Pricing

Pay-per-event. You pay for what came back, nothing else.

Event	Price	What it covers
video-scraped	$0.015	One video with full metadata.
channel-resolved	$0.005	One channel profile plus its recent video list. Charged once per channel.

Two events because the work is shaped that way: resolving a channel is cheap, loading a video page is not. Splitting them means a channel-listing job is not priced as if it were a video job.

What you are not charged for

Every item below is checkable against a run log:

	What happens here
Unavailable videos	Private, deleted, region-blocked, or mistyped IDs produce one row marked chargedForThis: false. Nothing is billed.
Empty or placeholder rows	If the video data did not come back, no row is written. There are no filler rows in your dataset.
Filtered-out videos	A video that fails minViews, the duration window, publishedAfter, or titleContains is not delivered and not billed. Channel videos that fail on the listing are never even fetched.
The free plan	Same code path, same fields, same limits. No demo mode, no 10-row cap, no nulls in place of data.
Plan-tiered pricing	$0.015 per video on every Apify plan — Free, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond. Check the Pricing tab: all six columns are identical.

That last row is worth checking on any Actor you compare, including this one. The Pricing tab shows the per-plan breakdown, and the price a listing advertises in its title is not always the price a free-plan run pays.

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What this Actor cannot do

Being straight about this up front so you do not buy the wrong tool:

• No transcripts or caption text. YouTube serves caption tracks only to clients that pass its proof-of-origin attestation, and returns an empty body to everyone else. That is true regardless of IP, proxy type, or HTTP client — we measured it across datacenter, residential, and unproxied connections, and every one returned 200 OK with zero bytes. Producing transcripts would mean defeating that attestation, which this Actor does not do. availableCaptions tells you which tracks exist so you can decide what to do next; the text itself is not something we can deliver honestly, so we do not sell it.
• No comments. Same reason.
• No search. This works from links and handles, not keywords. titleContains filters the videos a channel lists; it does not search YouTube.
• No deep channel history. A channel page lists about 30 recent uploads and the Actor does not page further, so filters select from those, not from the whole back catalogue.
• No exact like counts. YouTube stopped exposing them to logged-out clients. You get the rounded accessibility label instead, verbatim.
• No private, members-only, or age-gated videos. Those require an account, and this Actor never signs in to anything.

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How it stays working

Video pages are fetched through rotating residential connections because YouTube shows a bot check to datacenter addresses — we measured 1 usable response in 10 without one, and 9 in 10 with. Channel pages need no such thing and are fetched directly, so a channel-listing job does not pay for bandwidth it does not need.

The Actor also stops downloading each video page as soon as it has the two embedded JSON blocks it needs, rather than pulling the full 1.3 MB. That is roughly half the bytes, and it is why the per-video price can stay where it is.

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Integrating

Every run writes to a standard Apify dataset, so the usual routes all work: the REST API, the JavaScript and Python clients, scheduled runs, webhooks, and the MCP server for agent use. Two dataset views are provided — Videos & channels for everything, Channels only for the profile rows on their own.