YouTube Channel Scraper

The whole channel in one run: profile, every video, and optionally the comments underneath them.

Start from a handle and end with a dataset you can hand straight to a dashboard — subscriber counts, video catalogue, engagement, and audience voice, all keyed together.

What you get

Three record shapes in one dataset, tagged by recordType so they separate with a single filter.

channel — the profile

{
  "recordType": "channel",
  "channelName": "Marques Brownlee",
  "channelId": "UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ",
  "handle": "@mkbhd",
  "subscriberCount": 20100000,
  "videoCount": 1784,
  "viewCount": 4692518841,
  "description": "Quality Tech Videos...",
  "keywords": ["tech", "reviews"],
  "isVerified": true,
  "country": "US",
  "joinedDateText": "Mar 21, 2008",
  "externalLinks": [{ "title": "Website", "url": "https://mkbhd.com" }]
}

video — one per upload

{
  "recordType": "video",
  "videoId": "kYfNvmF0Bqw",
  "title": "The Best Smartphone Camera 2025",
  "type": "LONG_FORM",
  "uploadDateText": "3 weeks ago",
  "viewCount": 4821904,
  "likeCount": 79605,
  "durationText": "17:23",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kYfNvmF0Bqw/hqdefault.jpg"
}

comment — when collectComments is on, carrying the channel keys so it joins back without a lookup table.

Input

Field	Meaning
channelUrls	One or many. @handle, /channel/UC…, or a bare handle
collectChannelInfo	Fetch the profile record
includeVideos / videoType	Video catalogue, and which tab: ALL, LONG_FORM or SHORTS
maxItemsPerChannel	Per-channel budget
fetchLikes	Exact like counts (an extra pass — slower, richer)
minViews / minLikes / maxDaysOld	Filters applied while crawling
collectComments + maxCommentsPerVideo	Audience voice per video

{
  "channelUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd", "@veritasium"],
  "collectChannelInfo": true,
  "includeVideos": true,
  "videoType": "ALL",
  "minViews": 100000,
  "maxItemsPerChannel": 200,
  "fetchLikes": true
}

How it holds up on long channels

Channel tabs are lazily loaded, so a naive scraper stops at the first screen. This one takes a fast HTTP path when the page will give up its data that way, and falls back to a real browser scroll when it won't — including when the fast path returns nothing at all, which is exactly the case that produces silent empty runs elsewhere.

Filters are applied during the crawl, not after: maxDaysOld and minViews stop the scroll early instead of collecting thousands of rows and throwing most away.

Good for

• Competitive intelligence across a set of channels
• Pulling long-form videos and Shorts together, with subscribers and upload dates on every row
• Content calendars and upload-cadence analysis
• Finding a channel's outliers by views-per-day
• One-shot exports for BI tools, with channel/video/comment already joined

Notes

• maxCommentsPerVideo is an upper bound — YouTube stops paginating comment threads early, on every tool, not just this one.
• maxRepliesPerComment (default 10, 0 = no cap) stops one viral comment from spending the whole per-video budget on its own reply thread. At the default a 120-row request comes back as ~13 different comments with replies attached rather than a single comment and 119 of its replies.
• fetchLikes costs an extra request per video; leave it off for large catalogues unless you need exact counts.

Which one do I need?

You want	Use
The channel profile plus its video list, and the comments under those videos, in one dataset	this actor
The deepest metadata for every video — description, tags, category, chapters, caption languages	YouTube Video Scraper
Videos matching a keyword rather than a channel	YouTube Search Scraper

More actors from this author

• YouTube Channel Search — type a topic, get matching channels with subscriber counts. $1 per 1,000 channels
• YouTube Search Scraper — keyword search to videos with exact views, likes and publish dates
• YouTube Video Scraper — every video on a channel with tags, chapters and captions
• YouTube Comments Scraper — comments and reply threads from any video URL

Questions and problems

Open an issue on the Issues tab of this actor, with the run ID.