YouTube Scraper

Overview

The YouTube Scraper is a vital data extraction tool designed for video marketers, content creators, and brand researchers. It allows you to scrape extensive data from YouTube without dealing with the restrictive quotas of the official YouTube Data API. You can extract comprehensive details from individual videos (views, likes, precise publication dates, descriptions), scrape entire channels to analyze a creator's upload history and most popular content, or extract thousands of viewer comments for deep sentiment analysis. Furthermore, this scraper can extract automatically generated or manual subtitles/captions, making it incredibly powerful for building natural language datasets or analyzing video scripts at scale.

Key Features

Input Parameters

Sample Output

{
  "id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Music Video)",
  "channelName": "Rick Astley",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@RickAstleyYT",
  "subscribers": 4500000,
  "views": 1500000000,
  "likes": 18000000,
  "date": "2009-10-25T00:00:00Z",
  "duration": "3:33",
  "description": "The official video for 'Never Gonna Give You Up'...",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "commentsCount": 980000
}

How to Use

1. 1

   Click the 'Try for Free' button to open the YouTube Scraper on Apify.

2. 2

   Log in to your Apify account or create one for free.

3. 3

   Paste your target YouTube URLs (Videos, Channels, or Playlists) or enter search keywords.

4. 4

   Configure specific settings like adjusting the maximum results, or enabling comment/subtitle extraction.

5. 5

   Click the green 'Start' button and wait for the extraction.

6. 6

   Navigate to the Storage tab to download your video data or transcripts in JSON, CSV, or Excel.

API Example

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: 'YOUR_API_TOKEN',
});

const input = {
    "startUrls": [
        { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/@Apify/videos" }
    ],
    "maxResults": 100,
    "extractComments": false,
    "downloadSubtitles": false
};

const run = await client.actor("streamers/youtube-scraper").call(input);

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Pricing Structure

Pay for usage model. The actor is highly efficient; extracting basic video metadata costs approximately $1.00 per 1,000 videos. Deeply scraping thousands of comments or long video subtitles requires more compute time. Apify's $5 free tier is completely sufficient for most monthly research tasks.

Limitations

• Scraping the entirety of comments from a viral video with millions of comments will take significant time and compute.
• Auto-generated subtitles might have spelling or contextual inaccuracies depending on the audio quality.
• YouTube frequently throttles connections that download too many videos concurrently; the scraper automatically handles retries, but it may artificially slow down giant extractions.

Frequently Asked Questions