YouTube Channel Email & Lead Scraper

Turn a list of YouTube channels into a clean lead-gen dataset. Pass channel handles, IDs, or URLs — get back identity, activity stats, business email (when public), and every social/website link the channel exposes.

Verified against 89 real channels (mega creators, mid-tier creators, edu, news, gaming, music) in May 2026:

• 97% of channels yielded at least one reachable contact path
• 12% had a plaintext business email in their description (e.g. business@MKBHD.com)
• 55% had a gated business email signal (YouTube confirms an email exists behind sign-in — high-value triage signal for manual lookup)
• 64% had Instagram, 62% had Twitter, 76% had a website link
• 100% of valid channels yielded full identity (channel ID, handle, name, joined date, avatar)

What you get per channel

{
  "channelId": "UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ",
  "handle": "@mkbhd",
  "name": "Marques Brownlee",
  "subscriberCount": "21000000",
  "videoCount": "1821",
  "viewCount": "5395779547",
  "country": "United States",
  "businessEmail": "business@MKBHD.com",
  "hasGatedBusinessEmail": "true",
  "description": "MKBHD: Quality Tech Videos | YouTuber | Geek...",
  "joinedDate": "Mar 21, 2008",
  "vanityUrl": "http://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd",
  "keywords": "MKBHD MarquesBrownlee Marques Brownlee",
  "avatarUrl": "https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/...",
  "rssUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=...",
  "websiteUrl": null,
  "instagramUrl": "http://instagram.com/MKBHD",
  "twitterUrl": "http://twitter.com/MKBHD",
  "tiktokUrl": null,
  "facebookUrl": null,
  "patreonUrl": null,
  "linkedinUrl": null,
  "discordUrl": "http://discord.gg/MKBHD",
  "linksJson": "[{\"title\":\"Twitter\",\"url\":\"http://twitter.com/MKBHD\",\"host\":\"twitter.com\"}, ...]"
}

Numeric fields (subscriberCount, videoCount, viewCount) are normalized to integer strings — "21M subscribers" becomes "21000000". Compact suffixes (K, M, B), comma-grouped digits, and accessibility labels are all handled.

Social URLs are unwrapped from YouTube's /redirect proxy — you get the actual instagram.com/handle URL, not the obfuscated tracking link.

Common workflows

1. Cold outreach lead enrichment. Pass 1,000 creator handles → keep the 12% with plaintext email + the 55% with a gated email signal worth manual lookup + everyone with an Instagram/Twitter for DM outreach. Realistic conversion-ready list per 1,000 channels: ~600–700.

2. Influencer due-diligence. Verify a channel's join date, subscriber count, country, and social presence before sending a sponsorship offer. Useful for catching dead channels and bot inflation.

3. Creator-economy SaaS onboarding. Bulk-enrich a customer's competitor list with full social graph and activity stats — no manual copy-paste from YouTube About pages.

4. Newsletter / podcast partnership sourcing. Pull country + business email + website for a vertical (gaming, food, fitness) to build a tier-1 partnership pipeline.

Input

{
  "channels": ["@mkbhd", "@veritasium", "UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ", "https://www.youtube.com/@kurzgesagt"],
  "extractEmailOnly": false,
  "maxItems": 1000,
  "maxConcurrency": 4,
  "requestTimeoutSecs": 45,
  "proxyMode": "none"
}

Field	Type	Default	Notes
channels	string[]	—	Handles (@mkbhd), channel IDs (UC...), or full URLs. The actor normalizes everything to a /about URL.
startUrls	object[]	—	Alternative input form. Standard Apify { "url": "..." } objects.
extractEmailOnly	boolean	false	If true, only emit records where businessEmail is non-null.
maxItems	integer	100	Hard cap on records pushed to the dataset.
maxConcurrency	integer	4	Browser concurrency. Increase if you bump memory; decrease if you see CPU throttling.
requestTimeoutSecs	integer	60	Per-channel timeout. 404s fail in <1s regardless.
proxyMode	enum	none	none works for YouTube at small/medium volume. Use apify_proxy_datacenter for higher throughput, apify_proxy_residential only if you see blocks.

Output

Dataset is plain JSON, one record per channel. Field reference:

• Identity (100% reliable on valid channels): channelId, handle, name, vanityUrl, joinedDate, avatarUrl, rssUrl
• Activity (97% reliable): subscriberCount, videoCount, viewCount, country, description, keywords
• Contact (variable, see coverage notes): businessEmail, hasGatedBusinessEmail
• Social graph: websiteUrl, instagramUrl, twitterUrl, tiktokUrl, facebookUrl, patreonUrl, linkedinUrl, discordUrl
• Full link dump: linksJson — JSON string array of every external link with title, url, host

Every field is string | null. Numeric fields are normalized integer strings. Boolean fields are "true" / "false" strings (for clean CSV export compatibility).

What this actor does NOT do

• It does not log in to YouTube. The plaintext businessEmail field is only populated when a creator puts their email in their public channel description (~12% of channels). When YouTube has a business email behind their "Sign in to see email address" gate, we surface hasGatedBusinessEmail: "true" — but we don't bypass the gate.
• It does not scrape video lists, comments, or analytics. One channel = one record. If you need video-level data, use a dedicated YouTube Video Scraper actor.
• It does not deduplicate. Pass each channel once.

Performance & cost

Validated on Apify cloud, May 2026, 100-channel run, 4096 MB:

• 3.8s per channel average (single-CPU concurrency; bump memory to 8192 MB for 4-6× concurrent)
• $0.001 per channel actual Apify compute cost
• 404 / missing channels fail in <1s (no 30s timeout drag)
• 0 crashes across 100 channels including 11 intentionally-bad handles

Quickstart

# Run locally (requires Apify CLI + node 22)
apify call --input '{"channels": ["@mkbhd", "@veritasium"]}'

# Or via the API
curl -X POST 'https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/<actor-id>/runs?token=<your-token>' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"channels": ["@mkbhd", "@veritasium"]}'

Maintenance

If YouTube changes the embedded ytInitialData structure (specifically channelMetadataRenderer or aboutChannelViewModel), the parser may stop yielding some fields. The actor will degrade gracefully — channelId, handle, and at least one of identity/activity will still resolve — but I'll ship an update within 48 hours of detection. Open an issue on Apify Console for any field that suddenly drops below its baseline.