YouTube Trending Scraper

YouTube Trending Scraper: the most-viewed videos on YouTube for any topic you name

Give it a list of topics and get back the videos with the highest view counts for each one: title, channel, view count, age, duration, thumbnail and the watch URL. No account, no API key, no quota.

Read this before you buy, because the name promises something YouTube no longer offers. YouTube retired the standalone Trending feed, so there is nothing left to read. What this does instead is search each topic and sort by views, which means the ranking is all-time, not this week. Ask it for "music" and the top of the list is a video with a hundred million views from three months ago, not the clip everyone is sharing today. If what you need is what is rising right now, this is the wrong purchase, however cheap it is.

🔥 What YouTube Trending Scraper does

One search per topic, sorted by view count, paged until it has what you asked for or the topic runs out. Give it five topics and a limit of 100 and it works down the list, stopping the moment the total is reached, so put the topic you care about most first.

Numbers come back exactly as YouTube prints them, as text: 115,768,253 views, 3 months ago, 4:21. That is deliberate. YouTube never publishes a real timestamp on a search result, only a phrase, and parsing "3 months ago" into a date would be inventing precision that was never there. You get the string YouTube showed, and you decide what to do with it.

A video that appears under two of your topics is returned once and counted once.

📥 What you give it

{
  "keywords": ["music", "gaming", "ai"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run. The thumbnail link is cut short so the block stays readable:

{
  "ok": true,
  "videoId": "OQac93ARgQE",
  "title": "TUL8TE, Saint Levant - Nano I تووليت، ساينت ليفانت - نانو (Official Music Video)",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQac93ARgQE",
  "channelName": "TUL8TE",
  "channelId": "UC5a1OK2lI0Q2x2jyJSDyc7A",
  "viewCountText": "115,768,253 views",
  "publishedTimeText": "3 months ago",
  "lengthText": "4:21",
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OQac93ARgQE/hq720.jpg?sqp=...",
  "mode": "trending"
}

🧾 Reading the output

A diagnostic row does not stop the run. The other topics carry on.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open YouTube Trending Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Type your topics into Topics / keywords, one per line, most important first. 3. Set Max videos low while you are testing, since that is what you pay for. 4. Click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

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

You pay per video returned, so the bill follows Max videos rather than how many topics you typed. A video found under two topics counts once. Diagnostic rows are not charged, and a topic that returns nothing adds nothing to the bill.

💡 What people use it for

• Sizing a niche before making anything: what does the top of this topic actually look like, and how

big are the numbers.

• Finding the channels that own a subject, by grouping rows on channelName.
• Filling a content calendar with formats that already worked, rather than guesses.
• Building a watchlist: take the videoId values and feed them to a transcript or comment run.

🚧 What it does not do

• It is not this week's trending. The ranking is all-time views for the topic. YouTube retired

the feed that would have answered the other question.

• No description, no like count, no comment count. The search payload does not carry them. Pull

those separately if you need them.

• No dates. publishedTimeText is YouTube's phrase, not a timestamp, and nothing here turns one

into the other.

• News-shaped topics come back full of live streams, which have N watching where the view

count goes and no publish date or duration at all.

• A collaboration byline leaves channelId empty, because YouTube gives that row no single

channel to point at. channelName still fills in.

• 2,000 videos per run, and maxItems counts across every topic together.
• If YouTube decides to answer a sorted request in relevance order anyway, the rows come back in

that order and nothing on the row flags it.

🧭 Which YouTube actor do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a YouTube API key? No. No key, no OAuth, no quota to manage.

Why is a three-month-old video at the top? Because the sort is total views, and an older video has had longer to collect them. That is what "most viewed for this topic" means here.

Can I get exact numbers instead of text? Not from this one. viewCountText carries the digits YouTube printed, so 115,768,253 views parses cleanly enough, but the age never will.

Does it cover a country or a language? Not as a setting. Phrase the topic in the language you want and you mostly get that language back.

Is scraping YouTube legal? This reads public search results, the same ones a signed-out visitor sees. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a reasonable starting point, and we are not lawyers.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes, though remember the ranking moves slowly. Weekly tells you more than hourly.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Include the topics you used and the run id. Any diagnostic rows in your dataset already name the reason.