🎥 YouTube Video & Channel Scraper: High-Fidelity Data Extractor

A professional, high-performance YouTube scraper designed for reliability and speed. Extract structured data from Search Keywords and Channel Uploads using a sophisticated dual-engine strategy (Direct JSON + yt-dlp) and automatic production defaults.

No YouTube API key and no YouTube account login required.

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🌟 Key Features

• 🔍 Keyword Search: Extract up to 600+ videos per keyword query with deep metadata.
• 📺 Channel Scraper: Support for @handles, channel IDs, and URLs. Pull latest uploads with one click.
• 💎 High-Fidelity Metadata: Get Video IDs, Titles, Descriptions, exact View Counts, Relative Dates, and Durations.
• 🏢 Real Channel Insights: Captures Channel Avatar URLs, Subscriber Counts, and Verified Status.
• 🛡️ Automatic Proxy Handling: Tries direct requests first for lower cost, then falls back to Apify Residential US when needed.
• 🚀 Dual-Engine Logic: Uses direct ytInitialData parsing for speed with a robust yt-dlp fallback for high-quota reliability.
• ⚙️ Cost Controls: Bounded concurrency, duplicate removal, and an optional run-level result cap keep large jobs predictable.

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🛠️ How it Works

This Actor avoids the overhead of a headless browser, making it significantly faster and cheaper to run.

1. Direct Extraction (Default): Directly parses YouTube's internal data layer for near-instant results.
2. Intelligent Fallback: If a query requires deep pagination (like fetching 100+ videos), the engine automatically triggers an optimized fallback to fill your quota without timing out.

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📥 Input Parameters

Field	Type	Description
Keywords	array	One or more search terms (e.g., ["openclaw", "SaaS marketing"]).
Channels	array	List of channel handles or IDs (e.g., ["@mkbhd"]).
Max videos per keyword	number	The total number of videos to return for each search.
Max videos per channel	number	The number of recent uploads to fetch from each channel.
Max total videos	number	Optional run-level cap that stops scheduling new sources once enough results are collected. Use 0 for no cap.
Deduplicate videos	boolean	Removes duplicate video IDs across keywords and channels before writing results.

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📤 Sample Output

The Actor writes video records to the default dataset. The OUTPUT key-value record contains run metadata, totals, warnings, and links to the dataset.

{
  "record_type": "video",
  "query_type": "direct_search",
  "query": "openclaw",
  "video_id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "OpenClaw Deep Dive: Future of AI",
  "view_count": 1250430,
  "view_count_text": "1,250,430 views",
  "published_text": "2 days ago",
  "duration_text": "12:45",
  "channel_name": "Tech Insider",
  "channel_handle": "@techinsider",
  "channel_subscribers_text": "1.2M subscribers",
  "scraped_at": "2026-04-19T21:00:00Z"
}

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🧩 Run With Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

run_input = {
    "keywords": ["openclaw", "SaaS marketing"],
    "channels": ["@mkbhd"],
    "maxVideosPerKeyword": 10,
    "maxVideosPerChannel": 10,
    "maxTotalVideos": 0,
    "deduplicateVideos": True,
}

run = client.actor("thescrapelab/Apify-YouTube-Videos-Scraper-2-0").call(run_input=run_input)

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["title"], item["url"])

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💡 Use Cases

• Market Research: Analyze video performance trends in specific niches.
• Sponsorship Tracking: Monitor product mentions and influencer activity.
• SEO & Content Strategy: Find high-view videos with low competition to model your titles.
• Brand Protection: Monitor mentions of your brand across new uploads.

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⚖️ Legal Disclaimer

This tool is intended for research and educational purposes. Please ensure your use case complies with YouTube's Terms of Service and your local data privacy laws. We recommend using ethical scraping practices such as respecting robots.txt and using appropriate request delays.