YouTube Video Details Scraper — Creator Profile & Links

YouTube Video Details Scraper — Creator Profile & Links

This YouTube video scraper takes a list of video URLs or IDs and returns full video metadata alongside the complete channel /about profile behind each video — joined date, country, subscriber/view/video counts, and the creator's external links unwrapped out of YouTube's redirect wrapper into clean, platform-labeled destinations. Every response is structured JSON — ready to pass directly to an LLM, index into a vector store, or feed a monitoring pipeline. No YouTube account, API key, or OAuth consent screen is required to run it. Point it at a batch of video links once, and it comes back with the video and the person or channel behind it.

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What is YouTube Video Details Scraper — Creator Profile & Links?

It's an Apify Actor that fetches video metadata for one or more YouTube video URLs or IDs and, for each one, harvests the channel's full /about page — not just the avatar most video scrapers keep. It returns title, description, view/like/comment counts, duration, resolution, tags, hashtags, thumbnails, and (optionally) a timed transcript, joined with the creator's joined date, channel age, country, subscriber/view/video counts, and their external links resolved to real destination URLs with a recognised platform label. No sign-in, cookies, or Google API credentials are read or required — every field comes from what a signed-out visitor can already see.

Query controls exposed in the input:

• 🎥 Batch of video links or IDs — full watch URLs, youtu.be short links, /shorts/ links, or bare 11-character video IDs, mixed freely in one run
• 🔢 A processing cap (maxVideos) to run a cheap trial against a long list before committing to the full batch
• 🧑‍🎨 Creator profile harvest toggle — full /about page vs. skip it entirely
• 🔗 External link resolution toggle — unwrap YouTube's redirect?q= wrapper into a clean URL, domain, and platform label
• ⚡ Channel lookup de-duplication — fetch each channel's /about page once per run, not once per video
• 📜 Transcript inclusion toggle — pull the caption track with real per-cue timestamps, or skip it for a faster metadata-only run

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What data can you get with this Actor?

Four result types come back on every video row: the video's own metadata, the creator's channel profile, the creator's external links, and (optionally) the transcript.

Result Type	Extracted Fields	Primary Use Case
Video metadata	title, description, published_date, duration_seconds, views, likes, comment_count, engagement_rate, resolution, category, language, live_status, upload_type, tags, hashtags, thumbnails	Performance tracking, content research, catalog building
Creator / channel profile	creatorName, creatorHandle, creatorChannelId, creatorCountry, creatorJoinedDate, creatorChannelAgeMonths, creatorSubscriberCount, creatorTotalViews, creatorVideoCount, plus the full nested creator object	Influencer vetting, channel due diligence, creator research
Creator external links	creatorLinks (array of title, url, domain, platform, redirectUrl), hasChannelLinks, creatorLinkCount	Outreach and contact discovery, cross-platform presence mapping
Transcript	transcript (array of start, dur, text cues), transcript_message	Content analysis, captioning, LLM ingestion, compliance review

Creator Profile & Unwrapped External Links

This is the field set the competing YouTube scrapers reviewed for this README don't document. Instead of stopping at the channel avatar the base video-scraping pass already downloads, this Actor parses the same /about page HTML into a structured creator object — joined date, channel age in months, country, description, banner, verification badge, and subscriber/view/video counts as both sortable integers and YouTube's own display strings ("4.52M subscribers"). Any link the creator published in their channel links section arrives with YouTube's redirect?q= wrapper already unwrapped:

{
  "title": "Instagram",
  "url": "https://www.instagram.com/officialrickastley/",
  "domain": "instagram.com",
  "platform": "Instagram",
  "redirectUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/redirect?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2F..."
}

Coverage is honest about its limit: external links are only present when a creator actually published them — measured at 1 of 2 channels in testing. hasChannelLinks marks the difference; when a channel has none, creatorLinks is [], never a placeholder.

Transcript

When includeTranscript is on, the parser downloads the caption track and returns one cue per caption event with the real start time applied (tOffsetMs honored) — a caption parser that word-shreds every event into single-word rows sharing one timestamp is a documented defect this Actor's parser was built to avoid. Each cue carries start and dur in seconds and the merged text for that event, plus a transcript_message explaining the source track or why no transcript was available.

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How does this Actor differ from the official YouTube Data API?

The YouTube Data API v3 (videos.list, channels.list) returns core video and channel statistics through authenticated REST calls, but it stops well short of what this Actor returns. Downloading actual caption text via captions.download requires OAuth authorization and is restricted to users with edit permission on the video — in practice, the video's own owner — so a third party cannot pull captions for someone else's video through the official API at all. Channel /about fields like joined date, country, and creator-published external links are not exposed as queryable API fields either.

Feature	YouTube Data API v3	This Actor
Access requirement	Google Cloud project, API key or OAuth	No account, key, or OAuth
Video metadata (views, likes, duration, tags)	Yes, via videos.list	Yes
Caption/transcript text for a video you don't own	Blocked — captions.download requires edit permission on the video	Yes, from the public caption track
Channel joined date, country, channel age	Not exposed as a field	Yes
Creator's external/social links, resolved and labeled	Not exposed	Yes, with domain and platform
Usage limits	Governed by a default daily quota Google allocates per project (10,000 units/day combined, per Google's YouTube Data API documentation)	Governed by the proxy configuration and run time you choose
Output shape	Separate calls per resource, joined by the caller	One joined JSON row per video

Use the official API when you own the channel and need authenticated write access or guaranteed-fresh quota-metered statistics inside your own Google Cloud project. Use this Actor when you need the creator's public profile and external links joined to the video in one call, without provisioning API credentials.

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How to scrape YouTube video details with this Actor?

1. Open the Actor on its Apify Store page and click Try for free (or Run, if you already have it saved).
2. Enter your video URLs or IDs in videoLinks — one per line in the input editor, or as a JSON array.
3. Set the query controls you need: maxVideos to cap the batch, and toggle creatorProfile, resolveCreatorLinks, dedupeChannelLookups, and includeTranscript for the fields you actually want.
4. Start the run from the Apify Console, or trigger it via the API/CLI/schedule.
5. Download the results as JSON or CSV once the run finishes, or stream them from the dataset while the run is still going.

{
  "videoLinks": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ", "9bZkp7q19f0"],
  "maxVideos": 2,
  "creatorProfile": true,
  "resolveCreatorLinks": true
}

Running multiple video URLs in one job: videoLinks accepts an array, so a single run can process any number of URLs or bare video IDs in one job — mix full watch links, youtu.be links, /shorts/ links, and 11-character IDs freely. Videos are processed one at a time within the run; dedupeChannelLookups (default on) means a batch of many videos from the same handful of channels doesn't re-fetch each channel's /about page for every video, only once per unique channel.

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⬇️ Input

All parameters are optional — the schema has no required fields — but at least one video URL or ID must resolve from videoLinks (or the legacy startUrls key) or the run fails immediately with a clear error before any request is made.

Parameter	Required	Type	Description	Example Value
videoLinks	No	array (string list)	One or more YouTube video links. Accepts full watch URLs, youtu.be short links, /shorts/ links, or bare 11-character video IDs. Playlist and channel URLs are rejected with a clear error instead of producing a malformed row.	["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ", "youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw"]
maxVideos	No	integer, min 0, default 0	Stop after this many videos. 0 processes every URL supplied.	3
creatorProfile	No	boolean, default true	Fetch the full channel /about page — joined date, channel age, country, description, banner, verification, and subscriber/view/video counts as both integers and display strings.	true
resolveCreatorLinks	No	boolean, default true	Unwrap YouTube's redirect?q= links into clean destination URLs with a domain and recognised platform label.	true
dedupeChannelLookups	No	boolean, default true	Fetch each channel's /about page once per run and reuse it for every other video from that channel.	true
includeTranscript	No	boolean, default true	Download the caption track and return timed cues. Turn off for a faster metadata-only run.	true
proxySettings	No	object (proxy editor), default {"useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]}	Apify Proxy configuration.	{"useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]}

The original YouTube Video Details Scraper's startUrls and proxyConfiguration keys are also read and take precedence over videoLinks/proxySettings when both are present, so an existing input JSON built for that Actor runs unchanged here.

{
  "videoLinks": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw"
  ],
  "maxVideos": 0,
  "creatorProfile": true,
  "resolveCreatorLinks": true,
  "dedupeChannelLookups": true,
  "includeTranscript": true,
  "proxySettings": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

⚠️ Common pitfall: switching proxySettings.useApifyProxy off does not fully disable proxy use — a failed direct attempt automatically escalates to a residential proxy session rather than failing the row, because YouTube reliably bot-walls repeated datacenter/direct requests ("Sign in to confirm you're not a bot"). Measured on an 8-video batch through Apify egress: datacenter succeeded on 1 of 8, residential on 7 of 8. Residential is the default for that reason and is billed by traffic, which is why dedupeChannelLookups exists — it's the main lever for controlling proxy cost on a run with repeat channels.

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⬆️ Output

Results are typed, normalized JSON pushed to the Actor's default dataset, one row per input video — downloadable as JSON, CSV, Excel, or any other format the Apify dataset export supports. A successful row carries 42 top-level keys; a failed row carries the same 42 plus one additional error key describing what went wrong, which is why the dataset's default view (also 42 columns) does not surface error — it's specific to failure rows and sits outside the default column set.

Only rows where success is true are billed, under the pay-per-event charge video_result. Rows for videos that fail — private, deleted, unavailable, or an unrecoverable network error after every proxy attempt — are still written to the dataset with success: false and an error message, but are not charged.

Top-level fields:

Field	Type	Description
type	string	Always "video"
video_id	string	The 11-character YouTube video ID
title	string	Video title
description	string	Full video description
channel_id	string	The channel's real UC… channel ID
channel_name	string	Channel display name
channel_handle	string	Channel's @handle, or "" if none could be resolved
uploader_id	string	The raw uploader identifier as yt-dlp reports it (kept for backward compatibility with the original Actor, whose channel_id field held this value)
published_date	string	YYYY-MM-DD, or "" if unavailable
duration_seconds	number	Video length in seconds
views	number	View count
likes	number	Like count
comment_count	number	Comment count
engagement_rate	number	(likes + comments) / views, rounded to 4 decimals; 0 when views is 0
resolution	string or null	Real maximum resolution read from the video's format list (e.g. "3840x2160"), null if no format carried height data
category	string	Video category, first entry from yt-dlp's category list
language	string	Video language code, default "en"
live_status	string	Live status as reported by yt-dlp, default "none"
upload_type	string	Always "normal"
tags	array of strings	Video tags
hashtags	array of strings	Hashtags parsed out of the description (#tag → tag)
thumbnails	object	Keys among default, medium, high, standard, maxres, each a thumbnail URL — only sizes actually found are present
channel	object	See channel object below
transcript	array	See transcript cues below; [] if disabled or unavailable
transcript_message	string	Explains the transcript source or why none was found
creator	object	The full creator profile; see creator object below
creatorChannelId	string or null	Same as creator.channelId
creatorHandle	string or null	Same as creator.handle
creatorName	string or null	Same as creator.name
creatorCountry	string or null	Same as creator.country
creatorJoinedDate	string or null	Same as creator.joinedDate (YYYY-MM-DD)
creatorChannelAgeMonths	number or null	Same as creator.channelAgeMonths
creatorSubscriberCount	number or null	Same as creator.subscriberCount
creatorTotalViews	number or null	Same as creator.totalViews
creatorVideoCount	number or null	Same as creator.videoCount
creatorLinks	array	Same as creator.links; see creator link objects below
hasChannelLinks	boolean	true if creatorLinks is non-empty
creatorLinkCount	number	Length of creatorLinks
creatorProfileSource	string	"about_page" on the first video from a channel, "cached" on every later video from the same channel, "unavailable" if the profile couldn't be fetched, "disabled" if creatorProfile was off
success	boolean	true if the video was extracted successfully
scrapedAt	string	UTC ISO-8601 timestamp of extraction
inputUrl	string	The exact URL or ID you supplied for this row
error	string	Failed rows only. Human-readable reason the row failed

channel object:

Field	Type	Description
id	string	Channel's UC… ID
name	string	Channel display name
handle	string	Channel @handle
url	string	Channel URL
subscriberCount	string	Display string, e.g. "4520000 subscribers", "" if unknown
subscriberCountInt	number or null	Same value as an integer
logo	string	Avatar URL
badges	array of strings	["Verified"] if the video's channel is verified, else []

creator object (the full /about profile; all fields are null/empty until a successful fetch populates them — never a fabricated value):

channelId, handle, name, canonicalUrl, aboutUrl, description, country, joinedDateText, joinedDate, channelAgeMonths, channelAgeYears, subscriberCount, subscriberCountText, totalViews, viewCountText, videoCount, videoCountText, averageViewsPerVideo, isVerified, channelBadge, avatarUrl, avatarUrls, bannerUrl, links, linkCount, hasChannelLinks, profileFetched, profileError

isVerified comes from the video's own payload (channel_is_verified), while channelBadge reports what YouTube actually renders on the channel page — an Official Artist Channel carries "Official Artist Channel", not a generic checkmark label.

creatorLinks array items (also nested at creator.links):

Field	Type	Description
title	string or null	The link's display title on the channel page
url	string	The resolved destination URL
domain	string or null	Bare domain (instagram.com)
platform	string or null	A recognised label (Instagram, X (Twitter), TikTok, Discord, Patreon, Twitch, LinkedIn, GitHub, Spotify, Reddit, Threads, Snapchat, Pinterest, YouTube, Amazon, Substack, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, Shopify, Merch, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Apple, Telegram, WhatsApp, Linktree, Beacons, and others); null for an unrecognised domain — the URL is always still returned in full
redirectUrl	string or null	The original youtube.com/redirect?... URL before unwrapping

Transcript cues (transcript array items): start (seconds, string), dur (seconds, string), text (the merged caption text for that event).

Example output (3 rows):

[
  {
    "type": "video",
    "video_id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video)",
    "channel_id": "UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
    "channel_name": "Rick Astley",
    "channel_handle": "@RickAstleyYT",
    "uploader_id": "@RickAstleyYT",
    "published_date": "2009-10-25",
    "duration_seconds": 213,
    "views": 1794616163,
    "likes": 18400000,
    "comment_count": 2400000,
    "engagement_rate": 0.0116,
    "resolution": "3840x2160",
    "category": "Music",
    "language": "en",
    "live_status": "none",
    "upload_type": "normal",
    "tags": ["Rick Astley", "Never Gonna Give You Up"],
    "hashtags": [],
    "thumbnails": { "default": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/default.jpg", "maxres": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg" },
    "channel": {
      "id": "UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
      "name": "Rick Astley",
      "handle": "@RickAstleyYT",
      "url": "https://www.youtube.com/@RickAstleyYT",
      "subscriberCount": "4520000 subscribers",
      "subscriberCountInt": 4520000,
      "logo": "https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/…",
      "badges": ["Verified"]
    },
    "transcript": [
      { "start": "0.080", "dur": "3.680", "text": "we're no strangers to love" },
      { "start": "3.760", "dur": "3.760", "text": "you know the rules and so do I" },
      { "start": "7.520", "dur": "4.000", "text": "a full commitment's what I'm thinking of" }
    ],
    "transcript_message": "Transcript loaded from subtitles:en",
    "creator": {
      "channelId": "UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
      "handle": "@RickAstleyYT",
      "name": "Rick Astley",
      "canonicalUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@RickAstleyYT",
      "description": "The official YouTube channel for Rick Astley.",
      "country": "United Kingdom",
      "joinedDateText": "Joined Feb 1, 2015",
      "joinedDate": "2015-02-01",
      "channelAgeMonths": 137,
      "channelAgeYears": 11.4,
      "subscriberCount": 4520000,
      "subscriberCountText": "4.52M subscribers",
      "totalViews": 2513258892,
      "viewCountText": "2,513,258,892 views",
      "videoCount": 431,
      "videoCountText": "431 videos",
      "averageViewsPerVideo": 5831227,
      "isVerified": true,
      "channelBadge": "Official Artist Channel",
      "avatarUrl": "https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/…",
      "bannerUrl": null,
      "links": [
        { "title": "Instagram", "url": "https://www.instagram.com/officialrickastley/", "domain": "instagram.com", "platform": "Instagram", "redirectUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/redirect?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2F..." }
      ],
      "linkCount": 10,
      "hasChannelLinks": true,
      "profileFetched": true,
      "profileError": null
    },
    "creatorChannelId": "UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
    "creatorHandle": "@RickAstleyYT",
    "creatorName": "Rick Astley",
    "creatorCountry": "United Kingdom",
    "creatorJoinedDate": "2015-02-01",
    "creatorChannelAgeMonths": 137,
    "creatorSubscriberCount": 4520000,
    "creatorTotalViews": 2513258892,
    "creatorVideoCount": 431,
    "creatorLinks": [ { "title": "Instagram", "url": "https://www.instagram.com/officialrickastley/", "domain": "instagram.com", "platform": "Instagram", "redirectUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/redirect?q=..." } ],
    "hasChannelLinks": true,
    "creatorLinkCount": 10,
    "creatorProfileSource": "about_page",
    "success": true,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-07-26T09:00:00Z",
    "inputUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
  },
  {
    "type": "video",
    "video_id": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "title": "Second video from the same channel",
    "channel_id": "UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
    "channel_name": "Rick Astley",
    "creatorName": "Rick Astley",
    "creatorProfileSource": "cached",
    "success": true,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-07-26T09:00:12Z",
    "inputUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw"
  },
  {
    "type": "video",
    "video_id": "",
    "title": "",
    "channel_id": "",
    "channel_name": "",
    "creator": {},
    "creatorProfileSource": "unavailable",
    "success": false,
    "error": "This URL is a channel, not a single video. This Actor accepts video URLs only (watch?v=…, youtu.be/…, /shorts/…, or a video ID).",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-07-26T09:00:20Z",
    "inputUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@RickAstleyYT/videos"
  }
]

The second row above illustrates creatorProfileSource: "cached" — a second video from a channel already fetched in this run reuses that profile instead of triggering another /about request. The third row illustrates the failed-row shape: success: false, an error message, and every other field at its empty/null default — never a fabricated value standing in for missing data.

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How can I use the data extracted with this Actor?

• Influencer marketing and talent teams: vet a creator before outreach using creatorSubscriberCount, creatorChannelAgeMonths, and creatorCountry, then pull creatorLinks to find their published cross-platform presence without leaving the dataset.
• AI engineers and LLM developers: an agent issues a batch of video URLs, receives structured JSON back, and passes transcript text plus creator context directly to a model as grounded input — no scraping logic inside the agent itself.
• Market and competitive researchers: track a list of channels' representative videos over repeated runs to watch creatorSubscriberCount and creatorTotalViews move, and compare engagement_rate across a competitive set.
• Content and media research teams: use transcript cues for content repurposing, caption generation, or compliance/quote verification, joined with the exact video metadata each quote came from.

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📈 How do you track creator growth and video performance over time?

Monitoring here means running the same set of video URLs (or a representative video per channel you track) on a schedule and diffing the numeric fields between runs. What changes between runs is the signal: creatorSubscriberCount, creatorTotalViews, and creatorVideoCount moving between two runs shows channel growth; views, likes, comment_count, and engagement_rate moving on the same video_id shows how a specific upload is performing after publication.

The fields worth diffing run-to-run are creatorSubscriberCount, creatorTotalViews, creatorVideoCount, creatorChannelAgeMonths, views, likes, comment_count, and engagement_rate — all keyed by the stable video_id and creatorChannelId so rows from different runs line up. creatorLinks and hasChannelLinks are worth diffing too, since a creator adding or removing a published link is itself a signal.

A typical workflow: schedule a run across your tracked video list → pull the previous run's dataset → join on video_id → compute the delta on the fields above → alert when a delta crosses a threshold you set (a subscriber jump, a link added, a sudden engagement drop). This Actor has no built-in scheduler of its own; set the run to repeat using the Apify Console's Schedules feature, and pull each run's dataset via the Apify API for the comparison step.

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Integrate this Actor and automate your workflow

YouTube Video Details Scraper — Creator Profile & Links works with any language or tool that can call the Apify API, so it fits into whatever pipeline already runs your automation.

REST API with Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

run = client.actor("<YOUR_USERNAME>/youtube-video-details-scraper-creator-profile-links").call(
    run_input={
        "videoLinks": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
        "creatorProfile": True,
        "resolveCreatorLinks": True,
    }
)

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["title"], item["creatorSubscriberCount"], item["creatorLinks"])

Scheduled monitoring and delivery

The Actor has no webhook or delivery feature of its own beyond the standard Apify dataset. Use the Apify Console's Schedules to trigger runs on an interval, and Apify's webhooks to fire on run completion — pointing at your own endpoint to pull the finished dataset via client.dataset(...).iterate_items() — instead of polling manually.

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Is it legal to scrape YouTube video and creator data?

Yes — this Actor collects data that is already publicly visible to any signed-out visitor to a video page or a channel's /about page, and it does not use or accept any login, session cookie, or credential. Because the creator fields include personal data about an identifiable individual (name, country, joined date, subscriber counts a creator has chosen to make public), storing or repurposing that data in the EU or for California residents falls under GDPR and CCPA respectively, even though the source is public — publicity does not remove personal data from those regimes' scope. Scraping for one-off research carries a different risk profile than scraping at scale for AI training or bulk storage of individuals' data. Consult your legal team for commercial use cases involving bulk data storage or repurposing of creator personal data.

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❓ Frequently asked questions

Can I control which transcript language is downloaded? There's no explicit language parameter in the input. The transcript picker prefers the video's own detected language track from subtitles, falls back to automatic_captions in that same language, then falls back to English auto-captions, then to whatever caption track is available first — in that order.

Can I limit how many videos are processed in one run? Yes, with maxVideos. Set it to a positive integer to stop after that many URLs from videoLinks — useful for a cheap trial run against a long list. The default, 0, processes every URL supplied.

How does this Actor handle YouTube's anti-bot measures? Every video request goes through a proxy ladder: the proxy you configured first, then up to two residential-proxy retries with fresh sessions if the first attempt fails. YouTube reliably answers repeated datacenter or direct-IP requests with "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot," which is why residential proxy is the schema default and why failed attempts automatically escalate to residential even if you turned proxy use off.

Does this Actor extract the creator's profile and external links? Yes — the full profile is in the creator object and mirrored at the top level as creatorName, creatorSubscriberCount, creatorChannelAgeMonths, and related fields; external links are in creatorLinks. Links are only present when the creator actually published them on their channel — hasChannelLinks tells you which rows have them, and creatorLinks is [] (never a placeholder) when they don't.

How many results does this Actor return per query? One dataset row per video URL or ID you supply, up to maxVideos if you set it. This isn't a keyword-search Actor with a results cap to negotiate — you get exactly the videos you asked for, one row each, success or failure.

How do I use this Actor to monitor a channel's growth or a video's performance over time? Schedule the same video list to run repeatedly using the Apify Console's Schedules feature, then diff creatorSubscriberCount, creatorTotalViews, views, likes, and engagement_rate between runs on the same video_id. See "How do you track creator growth and video performance over time?" above for the field list and workflow.

Does this Actor work with Claude, ChatGPT, and AI agent frameworks? There's no MCP server documented for this Actor. It's callable as a standard HTTP endpoint through the Apify API from any agent framework — an agent can call the Actor with a batch of video URLs, receive the structured JSON dataset back, and ground its answer in the transcript and creator fields it returns.

How does this Actor compare to other YouTube video scrapers? As observed on their Apify Store listings, checked 2026-07-26: deanter's YouTube Video Details Scraper documents description and subtitle extraction only (Russian by default, English fallback) — no creator or channel data. beyondops' Youtube Metadata Scraper Pro documents metadata extraction with optional cookie-based login for age-restricted videos and CSV/Excel export, but its README doesn't document a channel /about harvest or external-link resolution. memo23's YouTube Transcript Extractor documents multi-source transcript extraction (including an AI fallback and translation) as its main focus; its README doesn't document creator profile or external-link data either. This Actor's differentiator against all three, per their published READMEs, is the joined creator profile and resolved external links on every row.

Can I use this Actor without managing proxies or platform credentials? Yes. Apify Proxy is configured by default (RESIDENTIAL), and no YouTube account, cookies, or API key are required or accepted — every field comes from a public page. You only need an Apify account to run the Actor itself.

What happens if I pass a playlist or channel URL instead of a single video? The row fails immediately with an explicit error naming the URL as a playlist or channel — it is never silently turned into a malformed video row. Playlist and channel URLs are detected by shape before any request is sent.

What happens if a video is private, deleted, or otherwise unavailable? The row comes back with success: false and an error field describing what happened, after every proxy attempt in the ladder has been tried. Failed rows are still written to the dataset for visibility but are not charged.

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💬 Your feedback

Found a bug, or a field that doesn't match what's actually on the page? Let us know through the Actor's Issues tab on Apify, or contact Scrapier support from the Actor's Store listing — reports like this are how the corrections documented in this README got made.