YouTube Comments Scraper · Channel Comments Monitor + Replies

YouTube comments monitor for whole channels: comments and replies of videos, Shorts or a channel's newest uploads, only new ones on schedules.

Comments and replies of YouTube videos and Shorts - or of a channel's newest uploads in one go. Newest first, an only-new mode for scheduled monitoring (you never pay twice for the same comment), keyword, likes and date filters, pinned / hearted / written-by-creator flags and the video's exact comment count.

No login, no Google account, no API key, no YouTube Data API quota.

What you get

	This Actor	Most comment scrapers
Input	video links, Shorts or channels (their newest N videos, Shorts or streams)	video links only
Monitoring	onlyNewComments: next run returns only comments posted since the last one	same comments again, charged again
Order	YouTube's own Newest first or Top comments	often only one
Filters before charging	keywords, exclude words, min likes, posted since	rarely
Likes	exact when YouTube shows them exactly, likesExact: false for "1.1K"	"1.1K" silently turned into 1100
Creator signals	isPinned, isHeartedByCreator, authorIsVideoOwner	partly
Video comment count	exact (1,849), from the comment header	rounded "1.8K" or missing

Use cases

• Community and brand monitoring: schedule a daily run on your own channel (or a competitor's) with onlyNewComments - each morning you get only the comments of the last 24 hours, straight into Google Sheets, Slack, Make, n8n or Zapier.
• Customer questions and buying intent: textKeywords: ["price", "where can i buy", "link", "discount"] over the last 10 uploads of a product channel.
• Creator and sponsor research: how many comments a channel's recent uploads really get, how often the creator replies (authorIsVideoOwner) or hearts comments.
• Product feedback mining: collect "Top comments" of review videos of your product and its competitors, with replies.
• Datasets for sentiment analysis or AI: clean JSON, one row per comment or reply, with the parent link for threads.

Input example

{
    "channels": ["@veritasium"],
    "videosPerChannel": 5,
    "sortBy": "newest",
    "onlyNewComments": true,
    "textKeywords": [],
    "includeReplies": false,
    "maxCommentsPerVideo": 200,
    "maxComments": 2000
}

• videos - watch?v= links, youtu.be/ links, /shorts/, /live/ or bare 11-character IDs.
• channels - @handle, youtube.com/@handle, /channel/UC..., /c/..., /user/... or a bare channel ID; with channelTab (videos, shorts, streams), videosPerChannel and skipVideosOlderThanDays.
• sortBy - newest (default) or top. The pinned comment comes first in both, as on YouTube.
• onlyNewComments + stateStoreName - monitoring memory per video (forces newest).
• commentsFrom (YYYY-MM-DD) or commentsNewerThanDays; textKeywords + keywordMode, excludeTextKeywords, minLikes.
• includeReplies + maxRepliesPerComment; maxCommentsPerVideo, maxComments (hard cap for the whole run), maxPagesPerVideo, requestDelaySecs.

Output example

Real rows from a run on 01 Oct 2026 (@veritasium, 2 newest videos, newest first, replies on):

{
    "recordType": "comment",
    "commentId": "UgyL2NE2HWz4MtoZLIx4AaABAg",
    "text": "Fight the data brokers, use code veritasium at https://incogni.com/veritasium to get an exclusive 60% off your annual subscription.",
    "authorHandle": "@veritasium",
    "authorChannelId": "UCHnyfMqiRRG1u-2MsSQLbXA",
    "authorIsVerified": true,
    "authorIsVideoOwner": true,
    "authorIsArtist": false,
    "likes": 427,
    "likesText": "427 likes",
    "likesExact": true,
    "replyCount": 83,
    "replyCountExact": true,
    "isPinned": true,
    "pinnedText": "Pinned by @veritasium",
    "isHeartedByCreator": false,
    "isEdited": false,
    "publishedTimeText": "10 days ago",
    "publishedAtLatest": "2026-09-21T15:05:43.077Z",
    "publishedAtEarliest": "2026-09-20T15:05:43.077Z",
    "replyLevel": 0,
    "commentUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk&lc=UgyL2NE2HWz4MtoZLIx4AaABAg",
    "parentCommentId": null,
    "videoId": "JsBZOcqZerk",
    "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk",
    "videoTitle": "The Insane Real Engineering of the Nazi Enigma Machine",
    "videoChannelId": "UCHnyfMqiRRG1u-2MsSQLbXA",
    "videoChannelTitle": "Veritasium",
    "videoChannelHandle": "@veritasium",
    "videoCommentCount": 6083,
    "videoCommentCountExact": true,
    "sortedBy": "newest",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-10-01T15:05:43.077Z"
}

A reply to it (shortened - same video fields as above):

{
    "recordType": "reply",
    "commentId": "UgyL2NE2HWz4MtoZLIx4AaABAg.Ab0oCv-duVMAb1F-b8xq2b",
    "text": "hi veritasium",
    "authorHandle": "@Acheron2Liam",
    "likes": 3,
    "likesExact": true,
    "publishedTimeText": "9 days ago",
    "replyLevel": 1,
    "parentCommentId": "UgyL2NE2HWz4MtoZLIx4AaABAg"
}

And a rounded count, flagged instead of presented as exact (Rick Astley, pinned comment by @YouTube):

{ "likes": 322000, "likesText": "322K likes", "likesExact": false, "isPinned": true, "isHeartedByCreator": true }

The run summary (SUMMARY in the key-value store) lists every channel and video with its status (ok, partial, comments_off, unavailable, not_found, failed, blocked, stopped), rows written, pages fetched, what was skipped and why paging stopped.

Works with: YouTube Channel Videos Scraper

Monitoring a channel end to end? Pair this Actor with YouTube Channel Videos Scraper: it lists every upload of a channel with exact views, likes and dates (with an "only new videos" mode), and this Actor then pulls the comments of those uploads, with onlyNewComments so a daily schedule only pays for what is new. Both Actors take the same channel handles as input.

How much does it cost?

Pay per result, nothing else: $0.0015 per comment or reply ($1.50 per 1,000). Only rows written to the dataset are charged; the platform usage is included.

Job	Rows	Cost
500 newest comments of one video	500	$0.75
Top 100 comments + up to 5 replies each, 10 review videos	~2,500	~$3.75
Daily monitoring of one channel's 10 newest videos, onlyNewComments, ~60 new comments a day	~1,800 / month	~$2.70 per month

Never charged: invalid input, unknown channels or videos, videos with comments turned off, deleted videos, blocked or failed requests, comments outside the date window, keyword and minLikes misses, duplicates and comments already delivered by an earlier onlyNewComments run. Set Max cost per run in Apify and the run stops cleanly at that amount; maxComments is a second hard cap.

Honest numbers

• YouTube shows comment times only as "3 days ago". You get that text plus publishedAtLatest / publishedAtEarliest, the two moments it can mean. There is no exact timestamp to be had without the official API; this Actor does not invent one. Date filters drop a comment only when it is certainly older than commentsFrom.
• Likes and reply counts are exact up to 999; from 1,000 YouTube rounds ("1.1K"), and the row says so with likesExact: false / replyCountExact: false. minLikes compares rounded counts by their highest possible value, so nothing that could qualify is dropped.
• The video's comment count comes from the comment header (1,849 Comments) and includes replies. It is exact in every video we measured; videoCommentCountExact flags it either way.
• Only-new mode remembers up to 1,000 comment IDs per video. The first run is the baseline (up to your limits). New replies to old comments are not detected - only new top-level comments (with their replies if includeReplies is on).
• Measured on 01 Oct 2026: two runs four minutes apart on a fresh video - the first returned 40 comments, the second only the 2 new top-level comments posted in between and stopped at the first known one (the header count went from 1,862 to 1,865 - it also counts replies).

Polite access - Bot protection is never bypassed

• Only YouTube's public web-client data for the watch page, its comment section and channel lists - the same requests youtube.com makes for a visitor who is not logged in. The video player / stream endpoint is never called, nothing is downloaded.
• One request at a time with a pause (requestDelaySecs, minimum 0.5 s, default 1 s), hard caps per video and per run, and filters applied before charging.
• Bot protection is never bypassed. If YouTube answers with HTTP 403 or 429, a captcha or "confirm you're not a bot" page, a consent or login redirect, or an answer without the expected structure, the Actor stops the whole run at once with status FAILED and a clear message (SUMMARY.blocked names where and why; remaining videos are listed under notReached). No retries of a block, no proxy or IP rotation, no header tricks, no login, no cookies, no consent clicking. Rows written before the stop stay in the dataset; nothing is charged for what was not delivered.
• A plain server error (5xx) is retried exactly once after 5 seconds; anything else is reported, not retried.

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube API key? No. And there is no daily quota like the YouTube Data API has.

Shorts? Yes - put Shorts links under videos, or use channelTab: "shorts" for a channel's newest Shorts.

Can it get all comments of a huge video? It pages as far as YouTube lets a visitor scroll, about 20 comments per page, capped by maxPagesPerVideo (default 50 pages = ~1,000 comments) and maxCommentsPerVideo. Raise both for more.

Why fewer comments than the count YouTube shows? The header count includes replies, and YouTube hides held-for-review and spam-filtered comments from visitors. Check SUMMARY for filters and limits.

Does it get e-mails or contact data? No. It returns what YouTube shows publicly next to a comment: handle, channel ID, text and counts. Avatars are not stored.

Is it legal? It reads public pages without logging in. Comments are personal data of their authors: you need your own legal basis (e.g. GDPR legitimate interest) for your purpose, keep only what you need, and respect YouTube's Terms of Service and the authors' rights when you republish text. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google.

Use it via API, integrations and AI agents

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/thequietstack~youtube-comments-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"videos":["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],"sortBy":"top","maxCommentsPerVideo":100}'

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("thequietstack/youtube-comments-monitor").call(
    run_input={"channels": ["@veritasium"], "videosPerChannel": 5, "onlyNewComments": True}
)
for c in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(c["videoTitle"], c["authorHandle"], c["likes"], c["text"][:80])

Works with Apify schedules, webhooks and integrations (Google Sheets, Make, n8n, Zapier, Slack), and as a tool for AI agents through the Apify MCP server.