YouTube New Upload Monitor - New Video Alerts

Get notified about every new video, Short and live stream from the YouTube channels you care about. Add a list of channels, put the actor on a schedule, and each run returns only the uploads that are new since the previous run - with title, publish time, views, likes, duration, description, thumbnail and whether it is a Short or a live stream. No login, no cookies, no YouTube API quota.

Use it as a YouTube upload alert, a competitor video tracker, or the trigger for a Slack, email, Zapier, Make or n8n workflow.

What you get

One row per new video:

• videoId, url, title, description, thumbnailUrl
• publishedAt and updatedAt (exact timestamps)
• views and likes
• durationSeconds and category
• isShort - true for YouTube Shorts
• isLiveStream, liveStatus (none, upcoming, live, ended, premiere) and liveStartedAt
• channelId, channelTitle, channelUrl and the sourceInput you entered
• detectedAt - when the monitor first spotted the video

Use cases

• New video alerts - be first to react, comment or share when a creator posts
• Competitor monitoring - track every upload from rival brands and channels in your niche
• Influencer and sponsorship tracking - log every video a creator you work with publishes
• Content curation and newsletters - collect fresh videos from a list of channels each day
• Automation triggers - start transcription, summarization or social posting workflows the moment a video goes live
• Shorts and live stream tracking - follow only Shorts, only long-form, or include live streams

How to use

1. Enter your Channels - one per line. Any of these work: @mkbhd, https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC..., https://www.youtube.com/user/... or a bare UC... channel ID.
2. Choose what happens the First check of a channel:
   • Baseline (default) - the actor remembers the channel's current videos and outputs nothing, so you only get alerted about uploads published afterwards.
   • Output the latest videos right away - returns the channel's most recent uploads (up to 15) on the first run, then only new ones after that.
3. Turn Include Shorts and Include live streams on or off.
4. Run once, then open Schedules in Apify Console and run it every 15 minutes, hourly or daily. Each scheduled run outputs only the videos that appeared since the last one.
5. Connect an integration (Slack, email, webhook, Zapier, Make, n8n, Google Sheets) to the run to get the new videos delivered wherever you work.

You can add or remove channels at any time. A newly added channel follows your First check setting; channels you already monitor keep their history.

How the monitor remembers what it has seen

Videos already reported are stored in a named key-value store (State store name, default youtube-new-upload-monitor-state) that persists between runs. To run several independent monitors - for example one per client or one per schedule - give each a different State store name. To start over and get alerted about a channel's current videos again, delete that store (or the channel's channel-UC... record in it) from the Storage section of Apify Console.

Output format

{
  "videoId": "RE3_PGwDwhw",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE3_PGwDwhw",
  "title": "Lose 150 Lbs Together, Win $250,000",
  "channelId": "UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA",
  "channelTitle": "MrBeast",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA",
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-17T16:00:18.000Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-10-21T22:14:36.000Z",
  "description": "Will this couple be able to lose 150 LBS together by the end?...",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RE3_PGwDwhw/hqdefault.jpg",
  "views": 118067952,
  "likes": 1744519,
  "durationSeconds": 2596,
  "isShort": false,
  "isLiveStream": false,
  "liveStatus": "none",
  "liveStartedAt": null,
  "category": "Entertainment",
  "sourceInput": "UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA",
  "detectedAt": "2026-10-21T22:23:15.594Z"
}

Export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or pull it straight into Google Sheets.

Good to know

• Each run checks the 15 most recent uploads of every channel, so schedule the monitor often enough that a channel never posts more than 15 videos between two runs.
• A live stream is reported once, when it is first detected - check liveStatus to see whether it was upcoming, live or already ended at that moment.
• Videos that were private or scheduled and later made public are reported when they appear in the channel's uploads.
• durationSeconds is empty for live streams that have not ended yet.
• Free plan runs report up to 50 new videos per run; any remaining new videos are picked up on the next run.

Pricing

You pay per new video found. Runs where nothing new was uploaded cost only a tiny amount of platform usage, which makes frequent schedules cheap.