YouTube Shorts Analytics — Exact View Counts

YouTube's channel page shows you "19M views". The Short itself carries 19,098,265. Most scrapers read the channel page and hand you the rounded number. This Actor returns both, side by side, so you can see what the rounding costs you.

Measured across one real run over the @MrBeast Shorts tab, 2026-08-13:

Short	views (exact)	viewsRounded	viewsRoundingLostPct
POV: You Time Traveled Back to 2016	15,876,054	15M views	5.52 %
Asking My Fiancée on a Date	18,759,779	18M views	4.05 %
Read My Book, You Could Win $1,000,000	19,780,917	19M views	3.95 %

On the first one the rounded number hides 876,054 views. Three Shorts that each read "19M views" on the channel page were 19.2M, 19.8M and 18.5M — a spread of 1.3 million that the rounded number makes invisible. Sort a spreadsheet by it and the order is simply wrong.

Built for Shorts, not bolted onto a video scraper

The best-rated YouTube Actor on the store is rated 4.9★ and still gets told, word for word, "Hard to use in shorts section". Shorts are the main case here, not an afterthought:

• Deeper than one page. A channel's Shorts tab lists about 48 Shorts. This Actor follows YouTube's own pagination and keeps loading until it has as many as you asked for — measured 96 listed for @MrBeast in a single extra request. Ask for 200 and you get 200, not 48.
• One HTTP request per Short. No browser, no 3 GB of RAM, no "internal server error".
• Real date filter. sinceDate / untilDate on the actual publish date, plus ageHours on every row so you can see at a glance how fresh the data is.
• Duplicates are never charged. Deduplicated by video ID before billing, along with everything a filter removed.
• Hard cost cap. maxCostUsd stops the run cleanly at your limit.

What you get per Short

videoId · url · title · channel · channelId · views · viewsRounded · viewsRoundingLostPct · likes · comments · engagementRatePctOfViews · publishedAt · ageHours · lengthSeconds · isShort · category · keywords · description

Honest note on likes. YouTube does not put the like count in the same payload as the view count. This Actor reads it from the page's own like counter and returns null when the page does not carry it — never guessed, never derived from views.

Input

{
    "channels": ["MrBeast", "@veritasium"],
    "maxShortsPerChannel": 30,
    "sinceDate": "2026-06-01",
    "minViews": 100000,
    "maxCostUsd": "1.00"
}

You can also pass single Shorts directly via videoUrls — /shorts/ links, watch links, youtu.be links or bare video IDs all work.

Channels without Shorts are reported with an explicit reason in the run's SUMMARY record — never a silent empty result.

Pricing

Pay per result: $2.50 per 1,000 Shorts returned. Apify platform usage is included in that price. Filtered-out Shorts and duplicates are not billed.

Limits, stated up front

• Reads the Shorts tab of a channel, newest first, and pages through it up to maxShortsPerChannel (max 200). Channels with a very long Shorts history are cut off at that limit — by design, so a run can never surprise you with its size.
• Public channels only.
• Comment counts are not exposed on every Short and are null when missing. No estimate is invented for them.