⚡ Fast YouTube Scraper — Search, Videos, Shorts & Channels

Extract YouTube video search results, YouTube Shorts, full video metadata, and channel uploads in milliseconds without official API quotas or browser overhead.

Powered directly by Google's internal InnerTube API, this Actor bypasses heavy headless browsers (Puppeteer/Playwright) to deliver 10x faster execution at a fraction of the cloud computing cost.

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🎯 Key Features

• 🚀 Ultra-Fast & Lightweight: Pure HTTP execution consuming only 256 MB RAM. Completes in seconds instead of minutes.
• 🔑 Zero API Keys Required: No Google Cloud console setup, no daily quota limits, no OAuth authentication.
• 🔍 3 Powerful Scraping Modes:
  1. Search Mode: Search YouTube videos and shorts by keywords with pagination and sorting filters (Upload Date, View Count, Rating, Relevance).
  2. Direct Video Details: Extract deep metadata (author, category, view count, length, keywords, status) for specific video URLs or IDs.
  3. Channel Scraper: Scrape video uploads and subscriber metrics directly from channel handles (@ChannelName) or URLs.
• 📱 Shorts & Regular Videos: Automatically detects and tags YouTube Shorts vs full-length videos.
• 💰 Ultra-Low Execution Cost: Run thousands of searches for cents on Apify.

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🆚 Why Choose This Over Other YouTube Scrapers?

Feature	Standard Apify Scrapers	Official YouTube Data API	Fast YouTube Scraper (This Actor)
Engine	Puppeteer / Playwright	REST API v3	InnerTube Protocol (Pure HTTP)
Memory (RAM)	2,048 – 4,096 MB	N/A	256 MB ⚡
Speed per Page	10 – 30 seconds	1 – 2 seconds	< 0.5 seconds 🚀
Daily Quotas	None	10,000 units/day limit	Unlimited
API Key Required	❌ No	✅ Yes (Google Cloud)	❌ No Key Needed
Cost per 1,000 runs	~$5.00+	Quota billing	~$0.10 💎

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📥 Input Options

1. Search Videos & Shorts (mode: "search")

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchKeywords": ["web scraping tutorial", "apify actors"],
  "maxResultsPerSearch": 50,
  "sortBy": "view_count"
}

2. Direct Video Details (mode: "videos")

{
  "mode": "videos",
  "videoUrlsOrIds": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kcaHAuGxmY",
    "https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ"
  ]
}

3. Channel Scraper (mode: "channel")

{
  "mode": "channel",
  "channelUrlsOrHandles": ["@Apify", "@freecodecamp"],
  "maxResultsPerSearch": 30
}

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📤 Output Sample (Dataset Item)

{
  "type": "video",
  "videoId": "5kcaHAuGxmY",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kcaHAuGxmY",
  "title": "How to scrape ANY website with Apify’s Web Scraper API",
  "descriptionSnippet": "Learn how to scrape any website using Apify's modern web scraping tools...",
  "channelTitle": "Apify",
  "channelId": "UC68O3D5qYkQn-pC_e_f-kkg",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC68O3D5qYkQn-pC_e_f-kkg",
  "publishedTime": "1 year ago",
  "viewCountText": "42K views",
  "viewCount": 42688,
  "duration": "14:23",
  "durationSeconds": 863,
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5kcaHAuGxmY/hqdefault.jpg",
  "badges": ["4K", "CC"],
  "isLive": false,
  "isShort": false,
  "searchQuery": "apify web scraping",
  "searchSort": "relevance",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-13T12:00:00.000Z"
}

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🛡️ Anti-Throttling & Proxies

InnerTube requests work reliably without proxies for moderate volumes. For enterprise high-volume extractions (10,000+ queries/day), simply enable Apify Proxy in the input configuration to rotate residential or datacenter IPs automatically.

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📄 License

Apache-2.0