YouTube Shorts Scraper

YouTube Shorts Scraper: Shorts from a channel or a keyword, with exact view and like counts

Give it channels and you get their Shorts feeds, newest first. Give it keywords and you get the Shorts that match. Every row carries the exact view count and like count, not the rounded "15M" the feed prints, plus the publish date, duration, thumbnail and channel.

Worth knowing before you plan around it: a keyword search returns YouTube's best matches for that phrase, not every Short that exists, and newest first only sorts what the run collected.

🎞️ What YouTube Shorts Scraper does

Channel Shorts come from the channel's own Shorts tab, so they are Shorts because YouTube filed them there, not because something guessed from their length. Keyword Shorts come from the Shorts filter on search, and the ordinary long videos YouTube mixes into that filter are dropped rather than returned.

With includeStats on, each Short gets one extra small request that turns the feed's rounded "15M views" into the exact 15198235, and adds the exact like count, the real publish date and the duration. Turn it off for a quicker run that returns only what the feed itself carries. The price per row is the same either way.

maxItems is the budget for the whole run, split evenly between your targets. Four targets and 60 rows gives fifteen of each. A Short that two of your targets both return is dropped before it is enriched, so it is never returned or billed twice.

📥 What you give it

{
  "channelUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast", "@mkbhd"],
  "searchQueries": ["cooking hacks"],
  "maxItems": 60,
  "sortBy": "newest"
}

Channels and keywords together count towards the 20 target limit. The input form starts maxItems at 20, includeStats on and sortBy at newest, so an API caller that wants something else should send it. Run it with empty input and you get one labelled sample row, uncharged, so you can see the shape before spending.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run:

{
  "ok": true,
  "charged": true,
  "recordType": "short",
  "input": "https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast",
  "searchQuery": null,
  "videoId": "T_SMf9j50uc",
  "title": "Can We Build an Entire Village?",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T_SMf9j50uc",
  "viewCount": 15198235,
  "viewCountText": "15M views",
  "viewCountIsApproximate": false,
  "likeCount": 569725,
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-18T16:00:01.000Z",
  "publishedTimeText": null,
  "durationSeconds": 39,
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/T_SMf9j50uc/frame0.jpg",
  "channelName": "MrBeast",
  "channelId": "UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA",
  "position": 1,
  "statsError": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-21T01:23:09.898Z"
}

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row can land in your dataset, and recordType is the field that tells them apart.

charged is a row-type marker written alongside recordType: real rows carry true, the sample and diagnostics carry false. Treat it as "this is a data row", not as a receipt. The run's own charged event count is the receipt.

Common error codes: NO_RESULTS when a channel has never posted a Short, NOT_FOUND when a handle does not resolve, RATE_LIMITED or SERVER_ERROR when YouTube pushed back, NETWORK when it could not be reached, and TIME_BUDGET when the run ran out of time before reaching a target.

The Overview table hides all three of those columns. In the Console table the sample row and the diagnostics look like ordinary Shorts. Download the JSON, or filter on recordType, before counting anything.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open YouTube Shorts Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Press Start with the input empty first. You get the free sample row and can see the shape. 3. Paste channels into Channel URLs or handles, or keywords into Keywords. 4. Set Maximum rows. Keep it small while you are testing. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it over the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.40 per 1,000 Shorts. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per Short row delivered. The sample row, diagnostic rows, duplicates inside a run and the long videos discarded from a filtered search are never billed. A channel that has never posted a Short delivers no charged rows, just one uncharged diagnostic saying so.

💡 What people use it for

• Tracking what a competitor posts as Shorts and how the view counts move week to week.
• Finding the format that works for a keyword before shooting your own.
• Pulling exact view and like counts for a report, which the feed's rounded text cannot give you.
• Feeding Short links into a downloader or a transcript actor for the ones worth studying.

🚧 What it does not do

• No comments, descriptions, hashtags, audio or transcripts. Rows describe the Short, not what is

in it. Other actors cover those, two of them linked below.

• Keyword results are matches, not an index. YouTube decides what a phrase returns, and a second

run can return a slightly different set.

• newest sorts what this run collected, not YouTube's whole catalogue for that target.
• Hidden likes stay hidden. likeCount comes back null rather than guessed.
• Nothing signed in. Members-only and age-restricted Shorts are not reachable.
• 20 targets per run, counting channels and keywords together.
• A channel with no Shorts tab returns a diagnostic, not an empty success.

🧭 Which YouTube scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a YouTube account? No. Everything here works signed out, and there is no API key.

Is maxItems per target? No, per run. It is split evenly between your targets unless you set maxItemsPerTarget.

Why is one row's view count rounded? Its stats request did not come back. viewCountIsApproximate is true on exactly those rows, and statsError says what happened.

Can I get Shorts published between two dates? Not directly. Sort by newest, pull more rows than you need, and filter on publishedAt yourself.

Is scraping YouTube legal? This reads public Shorts and public channel pages, nothing signed in. Results can still contain personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for collecting it. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Include the channel or keyword you used and the run ID, and the log is enough for us to see what happened.