YouTube Shorts Scraper & MCP Connector

YouTube Shorts Scraper & MCP Connector

Extract every Short from any YouTube channel — title, view count, like count, comment count, duration, upload date, description, and hashtags — with an option to download the actual video files. No manual scrolling through a channel's Shorts shelf, no missing stats, no duplicate entries.

Built for content researchers, social media teams, and creators who need a clean, structured feed of a channel's Shorts in minutes — not an afternoon of scrolling and copy-pasting.

Type a channel name → get every Short with full stats → deliver them straight into your CRM, Notion, Slack, or Jira.

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⭐ Why This Actor?

• ✅ Just enter a channel — accepts a plain name, @handle, channel ID, or full channel URL, no manual URL-hunting required
• ✅ Full engagement stats — views, likes, comments, upload date, description, and hashtags for every Short, not just the title and thumbnail
• ✅ Automatic deduplication — YouTube's Shorts shelf occasionally repeats entries across continuation pages; this Actor filters them out by video ID so your dataset never has the same Short twice
• ✅ Optional video downloads — grab the actual video file (or audio-only) for every Short, stored directly in the run's Key-Value Store with a public download link
• ✅ Fast, resilient extraction — built on yt-dlp with a lightweight metadata-only client, and a heavier fallback client kicking in only when a request genuinely fails
• ✅ Deliver anywhere via MCP connectors — push scraped Shorts straight into Notion, Slack, Jira, GitHub, Linear, Airtable, and more
• ✅ Export-ready — JSON, CSV, Excel, or direct API integration for your own pipeline

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📝 Use Cases & ROI

Use Case	Time Saved	What You Get
Content Research	1–3 hrs/channel	Every Short a competitor or creator has posted, with stats, ready to sort by views/likes
Trend Monitoring	1–2 hrs/week	Repeatable snapshots of view/like velocity across a channel's recent Shorts
Archiving & Repurposing	2–5 hrs/batch	Bulk-downloaded video files for captioning, translation, or repost workflows
Reporting & Analytics	1–3 hrs/report	Structured Shorts metadata piped into a spreadsheet, BI tool, or dashboard
Workflow Automation	1–2 hrs/setup	New Shorts pushed automatically into Notion, Slack, or a task tracker via MCP connector

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🚀 How to Use

1. Open the Actor on Apify.
2. In Channel name, handle, or URL, enter the channel you want to scrape — e.g. @MrBeast, MrBeast, https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast, or a channel ID like UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA.
3. Set Max Shorts to scrape (or 0 for every available Short).
4. Toggle Download videos on if you want the actual video files, and pick a Video quality.
5. (Optional) Pick an MCP connector to deliver results into Notion, Slack, Jira, etc.
6. Click Start — results are ready in minutes.
7. Open the Dataset tab to view or export results, or let the connector push them into your tools automatically.

🎯 Extended metadata (on by default): fetches full per-video stats — views, likes, comments, upload date, description, hashtags. Turn it off for a faster, listing-only run if you only need titles/URLs/thumbnails.

🌐 Proxy: requests run through Apify Proxy by default to reduce the chance of YouTube rate-limiting or blocking. You normally don't need to change this.

💡 First time with a connector? Run once with a connector selected — the run log prints the connector's available tool names, so you know what to put in Connector tool name.

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🧩 Input Configuration

Field	Type	Required	Description
channelUrl	String	✔️ Yes	Channel name, @handle, channel ID, or full URL to scrape Shorts from.
maxShorts	Integer	Optional	Maximum number of Shorts to collect, most recent first. 0 = all available Shorts. Default: 25.
extendedMetadata	Boolean	Optional	Fetch full per-video stats (views, likes, comments, description, hashtags). Automatically enabled when downloading videos. Default: true.
downloadVideos	Boolean	Optional	Download the actual video file for each Short into the run's Key-Value Store. Default: false.
videoQuality	String	Optional	best, 1080p, 720p, 480p, or audio. Only used when downloadVideos is on. Default: best.
proxyConfiguration	Object	Optional	Proxy used to access YouTube. Defaults to Apify Proxy — recommended to avoid rate-limiting/blocking.
mcpConnector	Connector	Optional	Deliver results into a connector you've authorized (Notion, Slack, Jira, GitHub, Linear, Airtable, …).
deliveryMode	Enum	Optional	summary (one call with all Shorts), chunked (split many Shorts across a few calls), perShort (one call per Short), or none. Default: summary.
mcpTool	String	Optional	Tool to call on the connector (e.g. create_page, send_message, create_issue).
mcpArguments	Object	Optional	Arguments for the tool; string values support {placeholders}.
mcpMessageTemplate	String	Optional	Template rendered per delivery, exposed as the {message} placeholder.

Example — Just scrape metadata

{
    "channelUrl": "@MrBeast",
    "maxShorts": 25,
    "extendedMetadata": true
}

Example — Scrape and download videos

{
    "channelUrl": "@MrBeast",
    "maxShorts": 25,
    "extendedMetadata": true,
    "downloadVideos": true,
    "videoQuality": "720p",
    "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

Example — Scrape and deliver to Slack (one message per Short)

{
    "channelUrl": "@MrBeast",
    "maxShorts": 15,
    "mcpConnector": "<your-slack-connector>",
    "deliveryMode": "perShort",
    "mcpTool": "send_message",
    "mcpArguments": { "channel": "#shorts-tracker", "text": "{message}" },
    "mcpMessageTemplate": "*{title}* — {url}\n{viewCount} views, {likeCount} likes"
}

Example — Scrape and create Notion pages (chunked)

{
    "channelUrl": "@MrBeast",
    "maxShorts": 50,
    "mcpConnector": "<your-notion-connector>",
    "deliveryMode": "chunked",
    "mcpTool": "create_pages",
    "mcpArguments": {
        "parent": { "page_id": "39fe5ea63f43800ab73ac3707c18d0af" },
        "pages": [{
            "properties": { "title": "Shorts {channelName} (part {part}/{partCount})" },
            "content": "{shortsText}"
        }]
    }
}

Placeholders available in arguments / template

Per-Short delivery (perShort): {channelName} · {channelUrl} · {id} · {title} · {url} · {viewCount} · {likeCount} · {commentCount} · {uploadDate} · {duration} · {description} · {hashtags} · {downloadStatus} · {videoDownloadUrl} · {thumbnailUrl} · {message}

Summary / chunked delivery: {channelName} · {channelUrl} · {shortCount} · {shortsText} (formatted list of Shorts) · {message} — chunked mode also adds {part} / {partCount}

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📦 Output Fields

Each scraped Short is stored as one item in the Actor's dataset. You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Field	Description
channelName / channelUrl	The channel the Short belongs to
title	Short's title
url	Direct link to the Short
viewCount / likeCount / commentCount	Engagement stats
duration	Length in seconds
uploadDate	Upload date (YYYYMMDD)
description	Full video description
hashtags	Tags/hashtags attached to the Short
videoDownloadUrl	Direct link to the downloaded video file (if downloadVideos is on)
downloadStatus	downloaded, skipped, or failed

Example Output

{
    "channelName": "MrBeast",
    "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast",
    "id": "abc12345XYZ",
    "title": "I Survived 24 Hours...",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/abc12345XYZ",
    "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/abc12345XYZ/hqdefault.jpg",
    "duration": 42,
    "viewCount": 15234000,
    "likeCount": 982000,
    "commentCount": 4310,
    "uploadDate": "20260710",
    "hashtags": ["shorts"],
    "downloadStatus": "downloaded",
    "videoDownloadUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../records/short-abc12345XYZ.mp4",
    "videoFileKey": "short-abc12345XYZ.mp4"
}

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🔌 Integrations & Delivery

Deliver scraped Shorts into any MCP connector you've authorized in Apify — no glue code, no webhooks:

• Notion — create a page per Short, or a batch page per chunk
• Slack / Discord — post new Shorts to a channel
• Jira / GitHub / Linear — open tasks for captioning, translation, or repost workflows
• Airtable / Google Sheets — append structured rows
• …or any other MCP-compatible connector

Credentials stay private — delivery runs through the Apify MCP Proxy, so the Actor never sees your connector tokens. The dataset is always saved regardless of connector settings, so a delivery failure never loses data. You can also consume the dataset directly via the Apify API, or wire it into n8n, Zapier, and Make.

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💰 Cost Estimation

Metadata-only runs are cheap — listing and fetching stats for ~25 Shorts typically takes well under a minute of compute. Enabling Download videos is the main cost driver, since each video file is fetched and stored in the Key-Value Store; expect proportionally higher compute time and storage usage for large batches or higher quality settings. Start with a small maxShorts value to estimate cost before scaling up.

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🛠️ Tips and Advanced Options

• Enable Apify Proxy (default) to reduce the chance of YouTube rate-limiting or blocking requests.
• Leave extendedMetadata off if you only need titles/URLs/thumbnails — it's faster since it skips the extra per-video request.
• Use videoQuality: "audio" if you only need the soundtrack of Shorts (e.g. for audio trend analysis).
• Large channels can have thousands of Shorts — set a sensible maxShorts limit and use Apify's scheduler to run incremental scrapes over time.

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❓ FAQ

Is this legal? This Actor only accesses publicly available pages on YouTube. You are responsible for how you use the scraped data and downloaded videos, and for complying with YouTube's Terms of Service and applicable copyright law in your jurisdiction — downloaded videos remain the property of their original creators.

Why did a channel return zero Shorts? The channel may not have any Shorts, may be private, or the name/handle you entered may not match exactly — try pasting the full channel URL instead.

Why is a Short missing view/like counts? Some creators hide public engagement stats — this is a legitimate result, not a scraping failure.

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🆘 Support

For issues, custom scraping requests, or feature suggestions:

Email: bhavin.shah@techforceglobal.com

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Need a Custom Pipeline?

Want multi-channel batch runs, deeper enrichment, or a full CRM/BI integration?

📅 Book a Free 15-min Consultation

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Made with ❤️ by Techforce Specialists in High-Performance Web Scrapers and AI Automation.

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Disclaimer

This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google. YouTube® is a trademark of Google LLC; all trademarks are property of their respective owners. The Actor collects only publicly available information from YouTube's channel and video pages. Use the data responsibly and in compliance with applicable laws (including GDPR/CCPA), YouTube's Terms of Service, and copyright law — downloaded videos remain the property of their original creators.