🔥 YouTube Trending Video Momentum Tracker

🚀 Compare YouTube's official Trending chart across countries in one run. View velocity, top videos, and momentum - not a single-region snapshot.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-07-11 · 📊 9 fields per region · Built on the official YouTube Data API v3

🎁 Try it free: the free Apify plan returns up to 10 results per run - enough to see the output quality. Any paid Apify plan unlocks full-size runs.

Give it a list of countries and it pulls YouTube's own official Trending chart for each, then computes average views-per-hour-since-publish - so you can tell India's chart is running HOT (321k views/hour) while Brazil's is STEADY (8.4k/hour), instead of scrolling five separate Trending pages.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Content creators, marketers, media buyers, trend researchers	Cross-market content strategy, ad-spend timing, viral-trend research, competitive content analysis

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📋 What this Actor does

• Fetches YouTube's official Trending chart (chart=mostPopular) per country you list
• Computes each video's views-per-hour since publish, averaged per region
• Labels each region's chart VIRAL / HOT / WARM / STEADY
• Surfaces the top video and a sample list per region

💡 Why it matters: total views reward old uploads. Velocity tells you what's actually blowing up right now, in which market.

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🎬 Full demo

🚧 Video walkthrough coming soon - the Quick Start below takes under 3 minutes end to end.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
regions	string	(prefilled)	Comma-separated ISO country codes, up to 10
maxResults	integer	10	Trending videos sampled per region (5-50)
apiKey	string	(required)	Your free YouTube Data API v3 key

Example: Compare 5 major markets

{ "regions": "US, GB, IN, JP, BR", "maxResults": 10, "apiKey": "YOUR_YOUTUBE_API_KEY" }

Example: Two-market check

{ "regions": "KR, MX", "maxResults": 15, "apiKey": "YOUR_YOUTUBE_API_KEY" }

⚠️ Good to know: you need a free YouTube Data API v3 key (Google Cloud Console > APIs & Services > Credentials, takes ~2 minutes, no cost). The free daily quota covers hundreds of runs.

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📊 Output

Each region returns 9 fields. Download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML, or consume via the Apify API.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
region	string	IN
videosSampled	integer	10
avgViewVelocity	number	321943.2
momentumLevel	string	HOT
topVideoTitle / topVideoChannel	string	Tabaahi (Toxic) / Zee Music Company
topVideoViews	integer	23945113
sampleTitles	array	["Tabaahi...", "TOXIC – Final Trailer"]
generatedAt	string	2026-07-10T23:57:13Z

📦 Sample record

{"region":"IN","videosSampled":10,"avgViewVelocity":321943.2,"momentumLevel":"HOT","topVideoTitle":"Tabaahi | Toxic (Hindi)","topVideoChannel":"Zee Music Company","topVideoViews":23945113,"sampleTitles":["Tabaahi | Toxic (Hindi)"],"generatedAt":"2026-07-10T23:57:13Z"}

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🏆	Velocity, not just views. Ranks by views-per-hour, not lifetime totals.
🌍	Multi-country in one run. Compare up to 10 markets side by side.
⚡	Built on YouTube's official API. No scraping - the actual Trending chart.
🔁	Automatic retries. Transient failures retry with backoff.
💳	Pay per result. No subscription. A typical 5-region run costs about $0.035.

📊 Turns 5 manual Trending-page checks into 1 ranked table.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Setup
⭐ YouTube Trending Video Momentum Tracker (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	Any country, up to 10 per run	Live per run	⚡ 2 min
Browsing youtube.com/feed/trending manually	Free	One country at a time	Live	🐢 Manual, one by one
Social listening SaaS	$100s+/mo subscription	Broad	Live	🐢 Sales call + onboarding
Manual copy-paste	Free	Current session only	One-shot	🐢 Hours of clicking

Pick this Actor when you want a ranked, multi-country momentum view without a subscription.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free Apify account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🔑 Get a YouTube API key. Free from Google Cloud Console (2 minutes, no cost).
3. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the YouTube Trending Video Momentum Tracker page on the Apify Store.
4. ✏️ Set your input. List your countries and paste your API key.
5. 🚀 Run it. Watch results stream into the Dataset tab.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

• Content creators: spot which country's Trending chart is heating up for a topic you cover.
• Media buyers: time ad spend to markets with genuinely accelerating attention.
• Marketers: back a "what's viral right now" pitch with real velocity numbers.
• Researchers: build reproducible cross-market attention datasets.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

• 🎓 Research & academia - media attention and virality studies across markets.
• 🎨 Personal & creative - content-calendar research for a YouTube channel.
• 🤝 Non-profit & civic - track public attention on a cause across countries.
• 🧪 Experimentation - prototype a trend-dashboard on real cross-market data.

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🔌 Automating YouTube Trending Video Momentum Tracker

Node.js (apify-client on NPM):

const { ApifyClient } = require('apify-client');
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('saint_person/youtube-trending-video-tracker').call({ regions: "US, GB, IN", maxResults: 10, apiKey: "YOUR_YOUTUBE_API_KEY" });
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Python (apify-client on PyPI):

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient('YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN')
run = client.actor('saint_person/youtube-trending-video-tracker').call(run_input={"regions": "US, GB, IN", "maxResults": 10, "apiKey": "YOUR_YOUTUBE_API_KEY"})
items = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items().items

📚 Full Apify API documentation

Apify Schedules triggers this Actor on any cron interval - daily for a standing cross-market trend watch.

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🧠 Use via MCP (for AI agents)

YouTube Trending Video Momentum Tracker is directly callable by any MCP-compatible AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and others) through Apify's hosted MCP server - no custom integration code needed.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/sse?actors=saint_person/youtube-trending-video-tracker",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" }
    }
  }
}

Once connected, just ask your agent something like: "Use the YouTube Trending Tracker Actor to tell me which of these 5 countries has the hottest Trending chart right now."

📚 Apify MCP server docs

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this Actor

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

It calls YouTube's official Data API v3 Trending chart per country, then computes views-per-hour-since-publish, averaged across the sample.

Do I really need my own API key?

Yes - YouTube's API has no anonymous access tier. It's free from Google Cloud Console and takes about 2 minutes to set up.

What counts as "VIRAL"?

An average view velocity of 1,000,000+ views/hour across the sampled Trending videos.

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor on any cron interval.

⚖️ Is this data legal to collect?

This Actor only collects data that is publicly accessible via YouTube's official API. No login, no bypass of access controls.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan?

No. The free Apify plan is enough for testing and small runs.

🔁 What happens if a run fails?

Transient errors retry automatically with backoff. If a run still fails, the log explains exactly why.

🆘 What if I need help?

Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

• Zapier
• Make
• n8n
• Google Sheets
• Slack
• Gmail
• Webhooks
• MCP

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🔗 Recommended Actors

Pairs well with HN Topic Momentum Tracker and GitHub Topic Momentum Tracker for cross-platform trend comparison.

💡 Pro tip: browse the complete saint_person collection for more tools like this.

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🆘 Help & custom requests

• 🐛 Something not working? Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab.
• 🛠️ Need a custom feature or a different data source? Open an issue describing what you need.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google LLC. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available data is collected.