YouTube Shorts Scraper for Trends & Channels

Monitor YouTube Shorts from channels or direct Shorts URLs and extract titles, views, likes, comments, rankings, hashtags, descriptions, transcripts, and automation-ready trend signals.

Best for

• Social media teams tracking Shorts by channel or campaign
• Creator teams measuring short-form publishing velocity and engagement
• Trend researchers collecting hashtags, titles, and view signals
• Automation builders sending fresh Shorts records to Sheets, Make, Zapier, n8n, or dashboards

Quick start

Use a small, stable listing run first:

{
  "channel": "https://www.youtube.com/@Dior",
  "max_videos": 5,
  "get_details": false,
  "include_channel_details": false,
  "extract_transcript": false,
  "max_comments_per_video": 0,
  "calculate_engagement": true,
  "batch_size": 1,
  "navigation_timeout_secs": 60,
  "video_timeout_secs": 10,
  "useApifyProxy": true
}

Use a smaller enriched run when you need comments, channel details, or transcripts:

{
  "channel": "https://www.youtube.com/@Dior",
  "max_videos": 3,
  "get_details": true,
  "include_channel_details": true,
  "extract_transcript": true,
  "max_comments_per_video": 5,
  "calculate_engagement": true,
  "batch_size": 1,
  "navigation_timeout_secs": 90,
  "video_timeout_secs": 20,
  "useApifyProxy": true
}

Common workflows

• Trend monitoring: run daily on a list of channels and sort by views, hashtags, and engagement fields.
• Creator benchmarking: compare Shorts volume, ranks, views, likes, and comments across channels.
• Campaign tracking: scrape direct Shorts URLs and keep sourceInput, rank, and scrapedAt for repeatable reporting.
• AI content research: enable transcript extraction on a small shortlist and feed titles, descriptions, hashtags, and transcripts into summarizers.

Useful input fields

Field	Use
channel	One YouTube channel or Shorts URL.
channels	Batch multiple channels when you want a shared run.
max_videos	Keep low for enriched runs.
get_details	Opens each Short for richer metadata.
include_channel_details	Adds channel-level metadata when available.
extract_transcript	Best-effort transcript extraction.
max_comments_per_video	Keep 0 for fast listing runs.
batch_size	Lower values are slower but more stable.
useApifyProxy	Recommended for cloud runs.

Output fields

The dataset can include:

• title
• url
• channelName
• channelUrl
• views
• likes
• comments
• rank
• hashtags
• description
• duration
• publishedDate
• engagementRate
• qualityScore
• transcript
• scrapedAt

Settings that convert best

• First run: get_details: false, extract_transcript: false, max_comments_per_video: 0.
• Enriched run: keep max_videos small and raise volume only after a clean sample.
• For scheduled monitoring, prefer several small runs over one large run.
• If timeouts occur, lower max_videos, batch_size, comments, and transcript options.

Cost and runtime expectations

This Actor is pay-per-event. A small run is the best way to inspect output and estimate cost before scaling. Detail, comments, channel enrichment, and transcripts require extra browser work and can increase runtime.

Limitations

YouTube Shorts pages can hide exact metrics, comments, or transcripts and can change layout without notice. Transcript extraction is best effort. Keep source URLs and timestamps in downstream reports.

Support

If a run returns unexpected data, open an issue from the Actor page with the input used, the run ID, and the result you expected.