YouTube Video Metadata & Thumbnail Extractor

Use this Actor to extract youtube video metadata and thumbnail into clean structured results for automation and AI workflows. It is designed for repeatable human, API, Apify AI, and MCP-driven workflows.

Extract clean, automation-ready metadata from public YouTube video URLs without creating a YouTube Data API project, managing API keys, or dealing with quota configuration.

This Actor is intentionally focused: give it YouTube video URLs and receive one predictable dataset item per input URL with normalized identifiers, title, channel/author information, thumbnail URL, provider metadata, and explicit success or error status.

Why use this Actor

Use it when you need lightweight YouTube enrichment rather than a large scraping stack. It is designed for workflows where predictable output, minimal setup, low per-result cost, and explicit failures matter more than collecting every possible YouTube metric.

Unlike workflows that require Google Cloud credentials and YouTube Data API quota management, this Actor uses public YouTube oEmbed metadata for supported public videos. No external API key is required.

Key features

• No YouTube Data API key required
• No Google Cloud project or quota configuration
• Accepts standard youtube.com/watch and youtu.be video URLs
• Normalizes the video URL and extracts the video ID
• Returns video title and channel/author name
• Returns the public thumbnail URL
• Includes provider metadata when available
• Produces one dataset item per input URL
• Returns an explicit ok status and error information instead of silently dropping failed inputs
• Processes up to 200 input URLs per run
• Structured JSON output for pipelines, catalogs, spreadsheets, databases, and automation tools

Input

Provide an array of public YouTube video URLs.

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://youtu.be/aqz-KE-bpKQ"
  ],
  "max_videos": 50
}

max_videos can be set from 1 to 200.

Output

Each input URL produces a dataset record. Successful records include fields such as:

• input
• video_url
• video_id
• ok
• title
• author_name
• thumbnail_url
• provider_name

Failed or unsupported inputs are represented explicitly so downstream workflows can distinguish a real failure from an empty result.

Example

A successful result can be used directly for video catalogs, CMS enrichment, editorial databases, thumbnail inventories, monitoring lists, or other automated workflows without additional parsing of a YouTube page.

The Actor keeps the output deliberately compact and predictable so it is easy to map into Zapier, Make, n8n, spreadsheets, databases, or custom applications.

Use cases

• Enrich a catalog of YouTube URLs with titles and thumbnails
• Build editorial or research inventories
• Normalize mixed YouTube URL formats
• Populate CMS or database records
• Validate public video links in automated workflows
• Collect thumbnail references for media-management pipelines
• Add channel/author metadata to existing URL lists

Pricing

Pay per result. The configured price is $0.0005 per dataset item, equivalent to $0.50 per 1,000 processed results before any plan-specific platform considerations.

One input URL produces one result record, including explicit error records when an input cannot be enriched.

Limitations

This Actor is not intended to replace the full YouTube Data API. It focuses on lightweight public oEmbed metadata and does not promise private data, authenticated content, view counts, likes, comments, transcripts, tags, or other fields that are not exposed by the public metadata source.

Private, deleted, restricted, unavailable, or unsupported videos may return an error result. The Actor does not bypass authentication, access controls, or platform restrictions.

Responsible use

Use the Actor only with public URLs and in accordance with applicable laws, platform terms, and your own data-handling requirements.