YouTube Shorts Scraper — Channel Shorts & Search, Views Growth

Give it YouTube channels (@handles, channel URLs or UC… IDs) and/or search terms and get one clean row per Short: title, link, views, channel, rank and thumbnail, with exact view counts and the publish date when you ask for them. $1 per 1,000 Shorts, no login, no API key.

Run it again — or put it on a daily or hourly schedule — and every row also tells you what changed since the last run: views gained, views per day, how far the Short moved up or down the list, and which Shorts are new. YouTube only shows you today's numbers; this keeps the history for you.

What you get

Field	What it is
source, sourceType	the channel or search term you gave, and channel or search
rank	position in that source: for a channel, newest first; for a search, YouTube's own order
videoId, url, title, thumbnailUrl	the Short (url is youtube.com/shorts/…; title has e-mail addresses and phone numbers removed)
views, viewsText, viewsExact	views as a number, as YouTube writes it, and whether it is the exact count (true with Exact views) or the rounded one YouTube shows in lists (30K views)
publishedText, publishedAt	the publish date as YouTube writes it (Aug 14, 2026) and as YYYY-MM-DD — only with Exact views
channelName, channelHandle, channelId	who posted it (channelHandle is e.g. @NASA)
previousViews, viewsChange, viewsPerDay, hoursSincePrevious	the views when this Short was last seen, the change since then and the change per day (null on the first run)
previousRank, rankChange, isNew	the rank when last seen, how far it moved (positive = moved up) and whether this Short was not in the list before (null on the first run)
observedAt, type	when it was read, and short or error

Use it for

• Trend watching — schedule a search such as your niche's keyword every day and see which Shorts are new and which are climbing
• Competitor and creator research — all Shorts of a channel with views and views per day, to see what actually takes off
• Reporting — a Shorts log for your own channel or a client's, with history you own, exportable to Sheets or your BI tool

Input

{ "channels": ["@NASA", "https://www.youtube.com/@TED"], "searches": ["cooking hacks"], "maxShortsPerSource": 50, "exactViews": false }

Use channels, searches or both. History is remembered per channel and per search term in a named key-value store in your Apify account, so the second run of the same Actor already shows changes. Schedule it (Apify → Schedules) for a daily history. Put everything in one run: the run-start fee is charged once.

Pricing

$1 per 1,000 Shorts, plus $0.01 per run. Error rows (a typo in a handle, a channel without Shorts, a search with no Shorts) are free. The $0.01 run-start fee is the one charge every run pays, even one that returns nothing.

Notes

• Rounded or exact views. In lists YouTube rounds views (30K, 1.2M), so with Exact views off a Short can show viewsChange 0 for days. Turn Exact views on when you track growth: the Actor opens each Short and reads the exact count (260,647) and the publish date. That is one extra request per Short, about a second each, at the same price.
• Change since the last run. viewsChange is only filled when both runs used the same kind of number (both exact or both rounded), so switching Exact views on or off skips the comparison once. viewsPerDay needs at least an hour between the runs. Without Exact views it is as coarse as YouTube's rounding.
• Memory. A Short that dropped out of the list and came back within 30 days is compared with when it was last seen (hoursSincePrevious tells you how long ago). After 30 days it counts as new again. If you raise Shorts per channel or search, the older Shorts that were not read before count as new in that run. For a channel (newest first), a new upload pushes every other Short down one place, so rankChange is -1 for all of them; watch viewsChange and viewsPerDay instead.
• First run. The since last run fields (previousViews, viewsChange, viewsPerDay, hoursSincePrevious, previousRank, rankChange, isNew) are null for a channel or search that is read for the first time. publishedText and publishedAt are null unless Exact views is on, because YouTube does not show the date in lists.
• Channels. You get the channel's Shorts tab, newest first, up to the number you ask for (500 at most). A channel has no more Shorts than it has: 201 for a large channel in our test.
• Searches. The search is filtered to Shorts and returns what YouTube gives a signed-out request in English. The Actor has no country setting: it runs from Apify's servers (in the US), so results are what a signed-out viewer in the US sees, and your own screen can differ. In our tests a search ran out after about 130 to 150 Shorts. YouTube also reshuffles search results from run to run: in one test, two runs seconds apart for the same term shared only 9 of 30 Shorts. So for a search, isNew means "was not in the list last time", not "was just published", and rankChange is noisy. For steady growth numbers track channels, whose Shorts list does not reshuffle. Channel names for search results cost one extra request per channel; if YouTube does not answer for one, channelName and channelHandle stay empty and channelId is still there.
• Shorts that cannot be opened with Exact views (removed, private, age-restricted) keep the rounded views from the list and viewsExact: false.
• Public data only: what anyone sees without signing in. No e-mail addresses or phone numbers are returned — they are removed from titles.

To track specific videos (exact likes and comments too), see YouTube Video Stats Tracker. For channel totals and growth (subscribers, total views, uploads), see YouTube Channel Stats & Growth Tracker. For where regular videos rank in YouTube search, see YouTube Search Rank Tracker.

For AI agents

{"channels": ["@NASA"], "maxShortsPerSource": 5} returns 5 rows with title, views, channel and link; add "searches": ["cooking hacks"] for a search, and "exactViews": true for exact counts and publish dates. Rows have type: short or error.

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