What is YouTube Shorts Scraper?

YouTube Shorts Scraper is a powerful and easy-to-use tool that allows you to extract Shorts data from chosen YouTube channels. Using this tool, you will be able to scrape:

• YouTube Shorts data: video URL, caption, duration, view count, availability of subtitles and comments, thumbnail URL, time of posting, number of likes/dislikes.
• Basic channel details: channel name, channel URL, number of subscribers.

How to use data extracted from YouTube Shorts videos?

The data extracted from YouTube Shorts can be used for a variety of purposes, including:

🤔 Finding current trends and opinions shared by content creators

👹 Identifying harmful or illegal content

💯 Accumulating information on products and services from video reviews

👁 Monitoring the market for brand mentions and position of your content in search results

🤺 Getting insights into competitors’ activity

How do I use YouTube Shorts Scraper?

YouTube Shorts Scraper is designed to be user-friendly, offering a smooth start for those who have never extracted data from the web before. Here’s how you can get started with YouTube Shorts Scraper to extract video data:

1. Create a free Apify account using your email.
2. Open YouTube Shorts Scraper.
3. Add one or more YouTube channels to scrape Shorts they post.
4. Click the “Start” button and wait for the data to be extracted.
5. Download your data in JSON, XML, CSV, Excel, or HTML.

⬆️ Input example

The input for YouTube Shorts Scraper should be one or multiple YouTube channels (with or without the @ symbol) and the number of Shorts you want to scrape.

Click on the input tab for a fuller explanation of input in JSON.

1{
2  "channels": [
3    "nasa",
4    "vsauce"
5  ],
6  "maxResultsShorts": 25
7}

⬆️ Output example

The results will be wrapped into a dataset which you can find in the Storage tab. Here's an excerpt from the data you'd get if you apply the input parameters above:

And here is the same data but in JSON. You can choose in which format to download your YouTube Shorts video data: JSON, JSONL, Excel spreadsheet, HTML table, CSV, or XML.

1[{
2  "title": "Selfie Waves",
3  "id": "mMaBVfIedFw",
4  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMaBVfIedFw",
5  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mMaBVfIedFw/hqdefault.jpg",
6  "viewCount": 2676670,
7  "date": "2022-11-17",
8  "likes": 211613,
9  "dislikes": null,
10  "location": null,
11  "channelName": "Vsauce",
12  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@Vsauce",
13  "numberOfSubscribers": 18500000,
14  "duration": "0:15",
15  "commentsCount": 9954,
16  "details": "",
17  "text": "",
18  "subtitles": null,
19  "comments": null,
20  "commentsTurnedOff": false
21},
22{
23  "title": "Artemis Systems Are Ready to Fly Astronauts on This Week @NASA – March 10, 2023",
24  "id": "HvbI3nPsrh0",
25  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvbI3nPsrh0",
26  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HvbI3nPsrh0/maxresdefault.jpg",
27  "viewCount": 45815,
28  "date": "2023-03-10",
29  "likes": 2353,
30  "dislikes": null,
31  "location": null,
32  "channelName": "NASA",
33  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@NASA",
34  "numberOfSubscribers": 11000000,
35  "duration": "2:27",
36  "commentsCount": null,
37  "details": "",
38  "text": "",
39  "subtitles": null,
40  "comments": null,
41  "commentsTurnedOff": true
42},
43{
44  "title": "Satellite Sees Global View of Sandy's Life to Landfall",
45  "id": "iWg8HIqC47I",
46  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iWg8HIqC47I",
47  "viewCount": 250000,
48  "date": null,
49  "channelName": "NASA",
50  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLA_DiR1FfKNvjuUpBHmylQ",
51  "numberOfSubscribers": 11000000,
52  "duration": "20 seconds"
53},
54{
55  "title": "Antares Rocket Raised on Launch Pad",
56  "id": "lOJXiXGt7ls",
57  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lOJXiXGt7ls",
58  "viewCount": 252000,
59  "date": null,
60  "channelName": "NASA",
61  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLA_DiR1FfKNvjuUpBHmylQ",
62  "numberOfSubscribers": 11000000,
63  "duration": "25 seconds"
64},
65{
66  "title": "NASA's Artemis I Rocket Launch from Launch Pad 39B Perimeter",
67  "id": "K6rUDI0MVXI",
68  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/K6rUDI0MVXI",
69  "viewCount": 193000,
70  "date": null,
71  "channelName": "NASA",
72  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLA_DiR1FfKNvjuUpBHmylQ",
73  "numberOfSubscribers": 11000000,
74  "duration": "43 seconds"
75},
76]
77...

Want to scrape YouTube comments or channels?

If you want to extract specific YouTube data beyond just Shorts, you can use one of the specialized scrapers below, each built particularly for the relevant YouTube data scraping case, whether it's comments, channels, or all data at once:

❓ FAQ

Can I integrate YouTube Shorts Scraper with other apps?

Yes. YouTube Shorts Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. You can integrate with Make, Llamahub, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, LangChain, GitHub, Trello, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Asana, and more.

Or you can use webhooks to carry out an action whenever an event occurs, e.g., get a notification whenever YouTube Shorts Scraper successfully finishes a run.

Can I use YouTube Shorts Scraper with the Apify API?

Yes. You can use the Apify API which will give you programmatic access to the Apify platform. The API is organized around RESTful HTTP endpoints that enable you to manage, schedule, and run Apify Actors. The API also lets you access any datasets, monitor actor performance, fetch results, create and update versions, and more.

You can use the apify-client NPM package to access the API using Node.js, or the apify-client PyPI package to access the API using Python.

Check out the Apify API reference docs for full details, or click on the API tab for code examples.

Is it legal to scrape data from YouTube videos?

Scraping YouTube is legal as long as you adhere to regulations concerning copyright and personal data. Our YouTube scrapers are ethical and do not extract any private user data, such as email addresses, gender, or location. However, since this scraper deals with cookies and privacy consent dialogs on your behalf, you should be aware that the results from your YouTube scraping might contain personal data.

Personal data is protected by GDPR (EU Regulation 2016/679), and by other regulations around the world. You should not scrape personal data unless you have a legitimate reason to do so. If you’re unsure whether your reason is legitimate, consult your lawyers. You can also read our blog post on the legality of web scraping and ethical scraping.

Your feedback

We’re always working on improving the performance of our Actors. So if you’ve got any technical feedback for YouTube Shorts Scraper or simply found a bug, please create an issue on the actor’s Issues tab in Apify Console.