YouTube Channel Scraper - Videos, Shorts, Views & Likes

What does YouTube Channel Scraper do?

Paste YouTube channels (@handle or URL), playlists or videos, get one row per channel and per video (views, likes, dates, duration, tags) for $1 per 1,000 videos and $2 per 1,000 channels, with no start fee. Failed, removed, filtered and duplicate items are free.

It turns YouTube channels, playlists and video links into clean rows: channel statistics and the newest videos, Shorts and live streams of each channel, with views, likes, publish dates, durations, tags and descriptions.

• 📺 Channel info: subscribers, total views, video count, join date, country, description, external links (Instagram, X, website ...), keywords, verified badge, avatar and banner.
• 🎬 Videos, Shorts and live streams: the newest up to 100 per tab, each with title, URL, views, duration and age, from one page per tab, so even 300 videos take a few seconds.
• 🔎 Full video details (optional): exact views, likes, publish date and time, category, tags, hashtags, chapters, full description, caption languages and live status.
• 🗓️ Date filter and monitoring: only videos after a date, or only videos your earlier scheduled runs have not seen.
• 💸 From $1 per 1,000 videos, no start fee. Failed, removed, filtered and duplicate videos are free.
• 🤝 Honest by design: no login, no cookies, no browser, our own user agent, and youtube.com/robots.txt is followed. No proxy needed.

Real results (3 October 2026)

9 inputs (5 channels with all three tabs, a playlist, 2 videos and a Vimeo link), 20 videos per tab: 264 rows in 4 seconds (263 charged: 5 channels, 258 videos), $0.27; the Vimeo line was a free invalid_input row.

Channel	Subscribers	Total views	Videos	Joined	Country	Links
MrBeast	519,000,000	141,443,077,746	1,004	2012-02-19	United States	4
Marques Brownlee	21,300,000	5,730,204,755	1,856	2008-03-21	United States	5
Veritasium	21,300,000	4,628,964,886	538	2010-07-21	United States	7
Linus Tech Tips	16,900,000	9,876,645,641	7,941	2008-11-24	Canada	7
hololive ホロライブ - VTuber Group	2,970,000	2,674,827,645	2,109	2016-03-03	Japan	6

Full details on (2 channels x 10 videos + 4 video links, one of them removed): 23 videos with full details, 2 channels, the removed video a free not_found row, 6 seconds, $0.05.

Use cases

• Influencer and creator research: compare channels by subscribers, total views, upload frequency and views per video before a sponsorship.
• Competitor monitoring: schedule a run with monitoring on and get only the new uploads of the channels you follow, with their first-day views.
• Content and SEO research: titles, tags, hashtags, chapters and descriptions of the best performing videos in a niche.
• Shorts analysis: views of every recent Short of a channel next to its long videos.
• Data for AI agents and dashboards: one clean JSON row per video, ready for Sheets, BigQuery or an LLM.

Need the spoken words too? The YouTube Transcript Scraper by TidyTools returns captions with timestamps for the same videos.

How much does it cost?

Event	Price	When
Video	$1.00 / 1,000 videos ($0.001 each)	a video from a channel tab or playlist (title, URL, views as YouTube shows them, duration, age)
Video with full details	$2.00 / 1,000 videos ($0.002 each)	charged instead of "Video" when the video's page was read with full details
Channel info	$2.00 / 1,000 channels ($0.002 each)	one channel row

Free: channels and videos that do not exist, private, removed or age-restricted videos, videos older than your date filter, videos returned by an earlier run in monitoring mode, duplicates and invalid inputs. No start fee. Larger Apify plans get the usual volume discount (Silver 10%, Gold and above 20%).

Example: 50 channels, newest 30 videos each: 50 x $0.002 + 1,500 x $0.001 = $1.60.

For comparison (Apify Store, checked 3 October 2026, users in the last 30 days): streamers/youtube-scraper (12,352 users) $0.004 per result; streamers/youtube-channel-scraper (2,949 users) $0.0013 per video; streamers/youtube-shorts-scraper (2,666 users) $0.004 per Short; apidojo/youtube-channel-information-scraper (433 users) $0.005 per channel URL; grow_media/youtube-channel-scraper (142 users) $0.001 per row. Those cover more (search results, comments, complete channel histories); this Actor reads only the public pages robots.txt allows (see Limitations).

Control your cost

• maxVideos (per channel tab or playlist) and maxResults (per run) cap the number of videos; channel rows are one per channel.
• Before reading, the run logs its plan (worst case) and compares it with your maximum charge per run. When the next video could pass it, the run stops: SUMMARY.status is LIMIT_REACHED and SUMMARY.notProcessed lists the inputs not read.
• Every row has charged: true or false. If Apify restarts the run, rows already delivered are skipped and not charged again.

How to use it

1. Channels, playlists or videos: one per line (spaces, commas and semicolons also separate; pasted quotes and brackets are removed). Channels as https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd, @mkbhd, a /channel/UC... URL or the channel ID; playlists as their URL; videos as watch, youtu.be or Shorts links or 11-character IDs.
2. Channel tabs: Videos, Shorts and/or Live streams.
3. Videos per channel tab or playlist: up to 100 (0 = channel info only).
4. Optional: Full video details, Only videos published after (2026-09-01 or 30 days), monitoring for scheduled runs.
5. Click Start. The Videos view shows the key columns, Channels the channel rows, All fields everything (CSV, Excel, JSON).

Input example

{
    "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd", "@veritasium", "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBCF2DAC6FFB574DE"],
    "tabs": ["videos", "shorts"],
    "maxVideos": 30,
    "videoDetails": false,
    "publishedAfter": "90 days"
}

Output example

Real rows (3 October 2026), shortened. A channel:

{
    "type": "channel",
    "channelId": "UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ",
    "channelName": "Marques Brownlee",
    "handle": "@mkbhd",
    "handleUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd",
    "subscriberCount": 21300000,
    "subscriberCountText": "21.3M subscribers",
    "videoCount": 1856,
    "viewCount": 5730204755,
    "joinedDate": "2008-03-21",
    "country": "United States",
    "links": [{ "title": "Twitter", "url": "http://twitter.com/MKBHD" }, { "title": "Instagram", "url": "http://instagram.com/MKBHD" }],
    "isVerified": true,
    "charged": true
}

A video from a channel tab (list level):

{
    "type": "video",
    "detailLevel": "list",
    "videoId": "3iRUwVzRDZQ",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iRUwVzRDZQ",
    "title": "Xiaomi 18 Fold: How Does This Happen?",
    "contentType": "video",
    "viewCount": 4200000,
    "viewCountText": "4.2 million views",
    "viewCountIsApproximate": true,
    "durationSeconds": 647,
    "publishedText": "17 hours ago",
    "publishedAtApprox": "2026-10-02T21:34:47.583Z",
    "channelHandle": "@mkbhd",
    "position": 1,
    "source": "channel:videos",
    "charged": true
}

A video with full details:

{
    "type": "video",
    "detailLevel": "full",
    "videoId": "QW_jlUn4gA8",
    "title": "This Is What a Godlike Civilization Would Look Like",
    "viewCount": 7212170,
    "likeCount": 146119,
    "durationSeconds": 852,
    "publishedAt": "2026-09-22T07:00:01-07:00",
    "category": "Education",
    "tags": ["kurzgezagt", "kurzgesatg", "kurzgsagt", "kurzgessagt"],
    "hasCaptions": true,
    "captionLanguages": [{ "language": "en", "name": "English", "autoGenerated": false }],
    "channelName": "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell",
    "channelSubscriberCount": 25600000,
    "via": "direct",
    "charged": true
}

What the fields mean

• detailLevel: list = from the channel tab or playlist page (views rounded as YouTube shows them, e.g. 4.2M, and an age such as "17 hours ago" with publishedAtApprox); full = the video's own page with player data (exact numbers and dates); page = the video's page without player data (see Limitations), charged at the list price.
• contentType: video, short or live (a live stream or its recording).
• viewCountIsApproximate: true when the number comes from a rounded label like "4.2M".
• chapters: from the description's timestamp lines (at least two, starting at 0:00).
• SUMMARY (key-value store): counts, perChannelTabs (videos per tab or "no videos"), videoPages (full vs page-only details), pagesFrom (which network read the pages) and the cost plan.

Use it from code

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/tidytools~youtube-channel-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls":["@mkbhd","@veritasium"],"tabs":["videos"],"maxVideos":10,"videoDetails":true}'

With AI agents (MCP): connect Apify's MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com?tools=tidytools/youtube-channel-scraper) to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask, for example, "Compare the last 10 videos of @mkbhd and @veritasium by views and likes". Minimal input: {"urls": ["@mkbhd"]}. Failed items are not charged and carry an errorType.

Limitations

• Newest 100 videos per tab or playlist. A channel's complete history and the "Popular" sort need YouTube's internal API, which youtube.com/robots.txt disallows, so we do not use it.
• No search, no comments, no hashtag pages. Search result pages (/results) and comments are disallowed or only reachable through that internal API. Enter channels, playlists or videos.
• Full details depend on the network. YouTube often answers data-center networks with "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" instead of a video's player data. The Actor then tries our own servers; if they get the same answer, it returns the page data YouTube still shows (exact views, likes, date, description, channel) as detailLevel: "page", without duration (unless the video came from a list), tags, category or captions, and charges it at the list price. In our tests on 3 October 2026: from a residential connection 23 of 23 videos had full details; from our data-center servers 7 of 20 (13 page-level). Adding an Apify residential proxy in Advanced settings (billed to your Apify account) usually gives full details for every video.
• List rows show what YouTube shows: rounded views (4.2M) and ages ("2 weeks ago"), so the date filter is approximate in list mode. Shorts lists show no age at all: with a date filter the Actor reads each Short's own page for its exact publish date (the row stays a list row at the list price; a page that cannot be read keeps the Short). Live streams and premieres may have no view count.
• Members-only, private and age-restricted videos are not read (no login).

Responsible use

The Actor reads only public pages, with an honest user agent (TidyToolsYouTube), following youtube.com/robots.txt. It does not log in, use cookies, solve CAPTCHAs or bypass bot checks: a page YouTube refuses is reported, not forced. It returns channel and video data that creators publish, not data about viewers. YouTube content belongs to its creators; use the data for analysis and follow YouTube's Terms of Service and the laws that apply to you.

FAQ

Does the Actor collect usage data? The Actor sends one anonymous usage counter per run (input type, item count range, outcome) to improve the tool; no URLs, content or account data.

Why do some videos have detailLevel: "page"? YouTube withheld the player data from the network that read the page (see Limitations). Views, likes, date and description are still exact; those rows cost the list price.

Why does a tab say "no videos"? The channel has no videos of that kind (for example no live streams), so nothing is charged.

Can I get only new videos every day? Yes: turn on Only videos not returned before, give the monitor a name and schedule the Actor. The first run returns everything and saves a baseline. Later runs look only at the newest "videos per channel tab" uploads, so set that number higher than the uploads you expect between two runs.

What happens with a mistake in the input? A line that is not a YouTube channel, playlist or video (a bare name without @, a YouTube page such as /trending, a malformed link, a number or object in the list), an unknown channel, an unknown tab name, or a date filter such as "yesterday" gives a free row with an errorType (invalid_input or not_found) and the run ends normally, never as a failed run. Turning both "Videos per channel tab = 0" and "Channel info row" off for channels only also ends as a free invalid_input row, because nothing would be returned.

Which separators and spellings work? Line breaks, spaces, tabs, commas and semicolons separate entries, so @mkbhd @veritasium is two channels. Quotes, brackets and a trailing slash around an entry are removed ("@mkbhd", (https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd/)). @MKBHD and @mkbhd are the same channel, and so are @handle, its /channel/UC... URL and a /c/ link: the channel is read and charged once (the repeat counts under duplicatesSkipped). A video or Shorts link in the list is returned as a video (full details, $2 per 1,000), not as its channel; a watch?v=...&list=... link is the video.

What if an option has the wrong type? "false", "no", "0" (text) count as off and "true", "yes", "1" as on. A number given as text works; a value that is not a number falls back to the default, and out-of-range numbers are brought into range (maxVideos 0-100, maxResults 1-100,000). Every such correction is listed in SUMMARY.inputNotes and logged as a warning.

Does it work with old /c/ and /user/ links? Yes, as well as @handles, channel IDs, m.youtube.com and music.youtube.com links.

Support

Open an issue in the Issues tab with your input and the run link. Issues are checked regularly.