YouTube Scraper

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Scrape YouTube videos, channels, and metadata without an API key. Search by keyword or scrape a full channel's video catalogue. Returns structured records with video ID, title, view count, channel, duration, publish date, and thumbnail URLs.

What it does

The actor uses YouTube's InnerTube REST API — the same JSON API used by YouTube's own web client. No API key, no browser rendering, and no proxy needed. Requests run on standard datacenter infrastructure, keeping costs low.

Two scraping modes are available:

• Search mode (mode: search) — submit one or more keyword queries and collect matching video results, paginated via InnerTube continuation tokens.
• Channel mode (mode: channel) — supply a channel URL, handle, or bare channel ID and collect all videos from that channel's Videos tab.

Input

Channel URL formats accepted:

• https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA
• Bare ID: UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA

Output

Each record contains:

Example: search mode

{
"mode":"search",
"queries":["python tutorial","javascript crash course"],
"maxItems":50
}

Example: channel mode

{
"mode":"channel",
"channelUrl":"https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast",
"maxItems":100
}

Performance and cost

• Memory: 256 MB
• Proxy: none required
• Approximate throughput: 20 videos per InnerTube page, ~200 ms delay between pages
• Pricing: pay-per-result (DATA_RECORD events)

Notes

• publishedAt returns YouTube's relative format ("3 days ago", "1 year ago") rather than an absolute ISO date — the InnerTube browse/search API does not expose absolute timestamps in these endpoints.
• likeCount and commentCount are not available from the InnerTube browse/search endpoints and will always be null.
• description is populated only when YouTube includes a snippet in search results; it is typically null in channel mode.
• The actor handles YouTube's EU consent mechanism automatically via a session cookie header.