YouTube Shorts Scraper

What does YouTube Shorts Scraper do?

YouTube Shorts Scraper is a specialized Apify actor designed to extract metadata from YouTube Shorts at scale. YouTube Shorts are short-form vertical videos (up to 60 seconds) that appear in a dedicated section on YouTube. This scraper supports two modes of operation: you can provide direct Shorts URLs to get detailed metadata for specific videos, or you can provide channel URLs to automatically discover and scrape all Shorts from a channel's Shorts tab.

For each Short, the actor extracts the video title, view count, like count, channel name, channel ID, video duration, high-resolution thumbnail URL, music/audio information (when available), comment count, upload date, and more. The data is returned in a clean, structured JSON format that is ready for analysis, reporting, or integration into your data pipeline.

This tool is perfect for tracking trending Shorts content, analyzing competitor short-form video strategies, monitoring brand presence on YouTube Shorts, building content databases for research, and identifying viral Shorts patterns across channels.

Features

• Extract detailed metadata from individual YouTube Shorts videos
• Scrape all Shorts from a channel's Shorts tab with automatic pagination
• Support for multiple URL formats: /shorts/VIDEO_ID, @handle/shorts, channel/ID/shorts
• Get view count, like count, comment count, duration, and thumbnails
• Extract music and audio information when available
• Batch processing of multiple URLs in a single run
• Proxy support for reliable large-scale scraping
• Fast and affordable at approximately $1 per 1,000 Shorts scraped
• Clean dataset output with customizable table view

How to Use

1. Go to the actor's input page on Apify Console
2. Add YouTube Shorts URLs or channel URLs to the "URLs" field
3. For individual Shorts, use URLs like: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID
4. For channel Shorts tabs, use URLs like: https://www.youtube.com/@ChannelName/shorts
5. Set the maximum number of results to extract (default is 100)
6. Optionally configure proxy settings
7. Click "Start" to run the scraper
8. Download results in JSON, CSV, Excel, or other formats from the Dataset tab

You can also call the actor via the Apify API or integrate it into your workflows using the Apify client libraries for JavaScript, Python, and other languages.

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description	Default
urls	Array	List of YouTube Shorts URLs or channel URLs (required)	-
maxResults	Integer	Maximum number of shorts to extract (1-10,000)	100
proxyConfiguration	Object	Proxy settings for the scraper	None

Output Data

Each scraped Short returns the following fields:

Field	Type	Description
videoId	String	YouTube video ID
url	String	Full Shorts URL
title	String	Video title
description	String	Video description
viewCount	Integer	Number of views
likeCount	Integer	Number of likes
channelName	String	Channel name
channelId	String	Channel ID
channelUrl	String	Channel URL
duration	String	Duration in M:SS format
durationSeconds	Integer	Duration in seconds
thumbnailUrl	String	Highest resolution thumbnail
musicInfo	Object	Music/audio metadata (song, artist, album)
commentCount	Integer	Number of comments
uploadDate	String	Upload date (ISO format)
category	String	Video category
isShort	Boolean	Always true for Shorts
scrapedAt	String	Timestamp of scrape

Pricing

This actor is priced at approximately $1 per 1,000 Shorts scraped, making it an affordable solution for YouTube Shorts data extraction. Actual costs depend on your Apify subscription plan and proxy usage.

Related Actors

Check out these other YouTube scrapers by quick_kirigami:

• YouTube Video Scraper - Extract video metadata including title, views, likes, and more
• YouTube Channel Scraper - Extract channel metadata, subscriber counts, and recent videos
• YouTube Comments Scraper - Scrape all comments and replies from YouTube videos