YouTube Channel Details Scraper

YouTube Channel Details Scraper turns any YouTube channel link into a clean, structured profile. Give it a channel URL, an @handle, or a UC... channel id — one at a time or a whole list — and get back the numbers and metadata you actually need: display name, handle, description, subscriber count, total views, video count, country, join date, external links, keywords, avatar and banner.

No YouTube Data API key. No headless browser. No login. It talks directly to YouTube's own internal InnerTube API (the same endpoints the YouTube website uses), so it's fast, lightweight and cheap to run.

Built for creators, analysts, agencies and developers who need dependable channel data without maintaining scraping infrastructure.

What you get

One dataset record per channel:

Field	Description
channelId	The channel's UC... id
title	Channel display name
handle	@handle, e.g. "@NASA"
description	Full channel description
subscribers	Subscriber count text, e.g. "15M subscribers"
subscriberCount	Subscribers as a number (abbreviated values are approximate)
videoCount	Video count text, e.g. "6,139 videos"
videoCountInt	Video count as an exact number
viewCount	Total view count text, e.g. "1,121,215,020 views"
viewCountInt	Total views as an exact number
country	Channel country, when the channel makes it public
joinedDate	Join date text, e.g. "Joined Jun 3, 2008"
keywords	Channel keywords/tags (space-separated string)
isFamilySafe	Whether YouTube marks the channel family-safe
availableCountryCodes	ISO codes where the channel is available
avatar	Highest-resolution avatar URL
banner	Highest-resolution banner URL
links	External links as [{ title, url }] (resolved past YouTube's redirect)
vanityUrl	The channel's vanity URL
url	Canonical channel URL

If a channel can't be read (doesn't exist, an invalid reference, or a temporary block), the actor still writes a row — { "channel": "...", "error": "..." } — so the rest of the batch always completes.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
channels	array of strings	✅	["https://www.youtube.com/@NASA", "MrBeast"]	One or more channel references: URLs (/@handle, /channel/UC..., /c/..., /user/...), bare @handle/name, or UC... ids
channel	string	—	–	A single channel; merged with channels
proxyCountryCode	string	—	US	Two-letter residential-proxy country code; leave empty to let Apify choose
language	string	—	en	Interface language code (hl) for language-dependent text

Example input

{
    "channels": ["https://www.youtube.com/@NASA", "MrBeast"],
    "proxyCountryCode": "US"
}

Example output row

{
    "channelId": "UCLA_DiR1FfKNvjuUpBHmylQ",
    "title": "NASA",
    "handle": "@NASA",
    "description": "NASA's mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration...",
    "subscribers": "15M subscribers",
    "subscriberCount": 15000000,
    "videoCount": "6,139 videos",
    "videoCountInt": 6139,
    "viewCount": "1,121,215,020 views",
    "viewCountInt": 1121215020,
    "country": null,
    "joinedDate": "Joined Jun 3, 2008",
    "keywords": "nasa space iss shuttle astronauts planets earth rockets hubble",
    "isFamilySafe": true,
    "availableCountryCodes": ["US", "GB", "DE"],
    "avatar": "https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/....=s900-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj",
    "banner": "https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/....=w2276-...-no-nd-rj",
    "links": [
        { "title": "nasa.gov", "url": "https://www.nasa.gov" },
        { "title": "Instagram", "url": "https://www.instagram.com/nasa" }
    ],
    "vanityUrl": "http://www.youtube.com/@NASA",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLA_DiR1FfKNvjuUpBHmylQ"
}

How it works

1. Resolve the channel. If the input already contains a UC... id (bare or inside a /channel/ URL) it is used directly. Otherwise the actor POSTs to youtubei/v1/navigation/resolve_url to turn an @handle / /c/ / /user/ reference into a UC... browse id.
2. Browse the channel. It POSTs to youtubei/v1/browse with the channel's browse id and reads metadata.channelMetadataRenderer (title, description, keywords, avatar, vanity URL, available countries) and the page header (handle, subscribers, video count, banner).
3. Read the About panel. It follows the channel's "About" continuation to fetch exact subscriber / view / video counts, the join date, the country and the external links.

Requests are routed through Apify residential proxies when available, with an automatic fallback to a direct connection so a blocked or absent proxy never crashes the run. Each channel is fetched independently, so one failure never affects the rest of the batch.

Pricing

This actor uses Apify's pay-per-event model. You're charged once per successfully scraped channel (channel-scraped); error rows are never billed, and the run stops automatically once your budget is reached.

Notes & limitations

• subscribers is returned as YouTube's own abbreviated display text (e.g. "15M subscribers"); subscriberCount is derived from it and is therefore approximate. viewCount/viewCountInt and videoCount/videoCountInt are exact.
• country and links are only present when the channel makes them public.
• One row is emitted per input channel; if a channel can't be resolved the row is { channel, error } and the run continues.
• YouTube can change its internal API at any time; this actor tolerates several response shapes but is not covered by an official API contract.

Use cases

• Enrich a list of creators with subscriber, view and video counts for research or outreach
• Build channel dashboards, catalogues or competitive-analysis datasets
• Monitor channel growth and metadata over time
• Feed clean channel metadata into downstream ML / data pipelines

Tech

Written in TypeScript on the Apify SDK. HTTP-only, so builds are fast and runs are cheap.

License

MIT © Assia Fadli