YouTube Shorts Scraper

🚀 YouTube Shorts Scraper: Views, Likes and Publish Dates

Scrape every YouTube Short of any channel with its exact view count, exact like count, comment count, publish date, title, description and hashtags. The YouTube Shorts Scraper takes channel URLs, @handles or channel IDs in bulk and returns one row per Short, newest first, with the channel's name, handle and subscriber count on every row. Use it for YouTube Shorts analytics, competitor research or as a simple YouTube Shorts API.

🎯 Use Cases

• YouTube Shorts analytics: see which Shorts of a channel got the most views and likes, and how fast it posts.
• Track YouTube Shorts views: schedule a daily run and watch views and likes grow on new Shorts.
• Find trending YouTube Shorts in a niche: scrape the Shorts of the top channels in your niche and sort by views or likes per day.
• Competitor and creator research: compare Shorts output and engagement across creators before a campaign.
• Content ideas: collect titles, descriptions and hashtags of the best-performing Shorts.

✨ Features

• Exact numbers: views and likes as exact counts (87,257,476, not "87M").
• Publish date: the calendar date each Short went live, plus the relative time ("5 days ago").
• Comment count as YouTube shows it, with the original text.
• Title, description and hashtags of every Short.
• Channel data on every row: name, @handle, ID, URL, subscriber count and verified badge.
• Full channel depth: pages through the whole Shorts tab until the channel runs out, or until your limit.
• Any channel format: youtube.com/@handle, /channel/UC…, /c/…, /user/…, a bare @handle or a channel ID.
• No duplicates: a channel entered twice (handle and ID) is scraped and charged once.

🛠️ How It Works

1. Paste channels: URLs, @handles or channel IDs, one per line.
2. Set Max Shorts per channel: the default is the 50 newest Shorts.
3. Run the scraper and download the Shorts as JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull them through the API.

⚙️ Input

Field	What it does
Channels	Channel URLs, @handles or channel IDs (UC…), one per line.
Max Shorts per channel	Stop after this many Shorts for each channel (newest first). Default 50.

{
    "channels": ["https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast", "@markrober", "@KhabyLame"],
    "maxItems": 200
}

💰 Pricing

Pay only for the Shorts you get. No monthly rental.

Event	Price	What you get
Short	$0.001 per Short ($1.00 per 1,000)	One Short with exact views, likes, comment count and publish date
Actor start	$0.00005 per run	Charged once when the run starts.

Examples: 50 Shorts from one channel = $0.05 · 10 channels × 100 Shorts = $1.00.

📊 Sample Output Data

{
    "videoId": "eXv6fWonvUM",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eXv6fWonvUM",
    "title": "Can You Scientifically Measure Fun?",
    "description": "Watch The Cat in the Hat, in theaters starting November 6th #wbpartner",
    "viewCount": 125075,
    "likeCount": 6087,
    "commentCount": 114,
    "commentCountText": "114",
    "publishDate": "2026-10-21",
    "publishedTimeText": "4 hours ago",
    "hashtags": ["#wbpartner"],
    "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eXv6fWonvUM/frame0.jpg",
    "channelId": "UCY1kMZp36IQSyNx_9h4mpCg",
    "channelName": "Mark Rober",
    "channelHandle": "@MarkRober",
    "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY1kMZp36IQSyNx_9h4mpCg",
    "channelSubscriberCount": 84300000,
    "channelIsVerified": true,
    "collaborators": [],
    "scrapedAt": "2026-10-21T17:26:32.263Z"
}

viewCount and likeCount are exact. commentCount is the number YouTube shows next to the comments, rounded above 1,000 (10K); commentCountText keeps the original. channelSubscriberCount is the rounded figure from the channel page. On collab Shorts collaborators lists every channel.

🔁 Schedule and Integrate

For Shorts tracking, run it once a day with the same channels and a small limit (for example the 20 newest Shorts): every run is a dated snapshot of views and likes. Set it up in Apify Schedules. Send the results to Google Sheets, Zapier, Make, n8n or a webhook with Apify integrations.

🤖 Use with AI Agents (MCP)

This Actor works as a tool in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients through the Apify MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com). An agent can call it with:

{ "channels": ["@MrBeast"], "maxItems": 20 }

❓ FAQ

Is there an official YouTube Shorts API? The YouTube Data API treats Shorts as regular videos: it can't list a channel's Shorts tab, and it needs an API key and a daily quota. This Actor needs no key and returns each channel's Shorts with views, likes and dates.

How many Shorts can I get per channel? All the Shorts the channel's Shorts tab lists. In our tests that was 90 to 353 per channel; set Max Shorts per channel high to get them all.

Why is the like count empty for some Shorts? The creator hid the like count. Those Shorts have likeCount: null.

Why is the description empty? Many Shorts have no description. Hashtags then come from the title.

Does it give the Short's length? No. YouTube doesn't show the duration on Shorts. Use the YouTube Video Details Scraper on the Short URLs if you need it.

Do I need a YouTube account? No.

🔗 Related Scrapers

• YouTube Channel Videos Scraper: every long-form video or stream of a channel, sorted by latest, popular or oldest.
• YouTube Channel Info Scraper: subscriber count, total views, country and links for each channel.
• YouTube Video Details Scraper: duration, tags, chapters and exact likes for any list of videos or Shorts.
• YouTube Comments Scraper: comments and replies from any video or Short.
• YouTube Transcript Scraper: the spoken text of each video with timestamps.