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Fast YouTube Channel Scraper Readme

What is Fast YouTube Channel Scraper?

Fast YouTube Channel Scraper is a data extraction tool created for scraping channel information from YouTube, going beyond the limitations of YouTube Data API.

• Extract all channel information
• Also includes the creator’s bio and number of subscribers
• Allows for bulk extraction of multiple channels, making for easy comparison

Which YouTube channel data can I extract using this tool?

How to use data after web scraping YouTube channels?

The data extracted from Fast YouTube Channel Scraper can be used in all kinds of ways, such as:

• Keeping track of competitors' channels and monitoring activity on them
• Enrich your lead generation data with YouTube channel information
• Understanding a channel audience's interests
• Analyzing engagement statistics to improve performance
• Tracking trends in the channel's popularity
• Developing marketing and advertising campaigns based on the above data

How do I use Fast YouTube Channel Scraper?

Fast YouTube Channel Scraper is designed to be user-friendly, even for those who have never extracted data from the web before. Here’s how you can use YouTube Channel Scraper to extract data from any number of YouTube channels:

1. Create an Apify account
2. Open Fast YouTube Channel Scraper.
3. Add one or more YouTube channel URLs to scrape channel info.
4. Click the “Start” button and wait for the data to be extracted.
5. Download your data in JSON, XML, CSV, Excel, or HTML.

⬇️ Input example

To use Fast YouTube Channel Scraper, all you need as input is one or more YouTube channel URLs. Simply add these to the top field in the Console, then add how many videos, shorts, or streams you want to scrape.

💡 If you want only channel information without videos, input "0" to the maximum number of videos, shorts, and streams fields.

Click on the input tab for more advanced parameters, below an example in JSON.

{
"maxResultStreams":0,
"maxResults":10,
"maxResultsShorts":0,
"oldestPostDate":"100 days",
"sortVideosBy":"NEWEST",
"startUrls":[
{
"url":"https://www.youtube.com/@Apify",
"method":"GET"
}
]
}

⬆️ Output example

The scraped YouTube channel data will be shown as a dataset which you can find in the Storage tab. Note that the output is organized as a table for viewing convenience, but it doesn’t show all the fields:

You can preview all the fields, or export the data in JSON, Excel, HTML table, CSV, or XML. Here is what it would look like in JSON:

{
"id":"kwWeUpLAG0I",
"title":"How to Scrape Facebook Reels for Infinite Content Ideas",
"duration":"5:13",
"channelName":"Apify",
"channelUsername":"Apify",
"channelUrl":"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTgwcoeGGKmZ3zzCXN2qo_A",
"date":"6 days ago",
"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwWeUpLAG0I",
"viewCount":402,
"fromYTUrl":"https://www.youtube.com/@Apify/videos",
"type":"video",
"thumbnailUrl":"https://i9.ytimg.com/vi/kwWeUpLAG0I/hqdefault_custom_1.jpg?sqp=COjs6sIG-oaymwEiCKgBEF5IWvKriqkDFQgBFQAAAAAYASUAAMhCPQCAokN4AQ==&rs=AOn4CLCjizgVGFlvoWlFH4qZAY7eXIcKFw",
"input":"https://www.youtube.com/@Apify",
"order":0,
"aboutChannelInfo":{
"channelDescription":"Welcome to Apify’s official YouTube channel!\n\nApify is a web scraping and automation platform, which lets you automate anything you can do in a web browser 🚀\n\nGather data with pre-built tools we call Actors and further use it to feed generative AI or for lead generation, machine learning, market research, and a myriad of other use cases 🤖\n\nAre you a developer? Build your own Actors and publish them on Apify Store to earn passive income 💸\n\nSubscribe now for tutorials on how to use our Actors, build your own ones, utilize our open-source libraries, or learn about various web scraping technologies 📖",
"channelJoinedDate":"Jan 4, 2017",
"channelDescriptionLinks":[
{
"text":"Try Apify for FREE",
"url":"https://apify.com/"
},
{
"text":"Join our Discord",
"url":"https://discord.com/invite/jyEM2PRvMU"
},
{
"text":"LinkedIn",
"url":"https://www.linkedin.com/company/apifytech"
},
{
"text":"Twitter X",
"url":"https://twitter.com/apify"
},
{
"text":"GitHub",
"url":"https://github.com/apify"
},
{
"text":"Apify Docs",
"url":"https://docs.apify.com"
},
{
"text":"Schedule demo",
"url":"https://apify.com/professional-services"
}
],
"channelLocation":"Czechia",
"channelUsername":"Apify",
"channelAvatarUrl":"https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/mcMDz5bXyewUKn5L1RQu8_dYHq3PTdc-AfL4rWUwmYwJr37WikQCE7Ek9M38yucDNh1vyvJTcw=s160-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj",
"channelBannerUrl":"https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/y6R2IxD_CkgaHgkSEpqaU6Pe1U4O2QtP2XOK47jEszZTqH5LTuXzadO704MsQMLOXvLannhLCw=w2560-fcrop64=1,00005a57ffffa5a8-k-c0xffffffff-no-nd-rj",
"channelTotalVideos":169,
"channelTotalViews":660763,
"numberOfSubscribers":8390,
"isChannelVerified":false,
"channelName":"Apify",
"channelUrl":"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTgwcoeGGKmZ3zzCXN2qo_A",
"channelId":"UCTgwcoeGGKmZ3zzCXN2qo_A",
"inputChannelUrl":"https://www.youtube.com/@Apify",
"isAgeRestricted":false
},

▶️ Want to try other YouTube APIs and scrapers?

If you want to extract specific YouTube data, you can use one of these specialized scrapers:

• ▶️ YouTube Scraper
• 💬 YouTube Comments Scraper
• ▶️ YouTube Shorts Scraper
• 📽️ YouTube Video Scraper by Hashtag

If you need to download scraped YouTube videos, you can use YouTube Video Downloader.

You can also combine YouTube data with that from other social networks. Try:

• TikTok scrapers
• Instagram scrapers
• Facebook scrapers
• Or any of our social media scrapers

Furthermore, you can use the power of AI agents to do multiple tasks at one. For example, our Comments Analyzer Agent can perform sentiment analysis of YouTube videos, or you could try our Influencer Discovery Agent for lead generation on TikTok videos.

Integrating YouTube Shorts Scraper with other apps

YouTube Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. These include Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Drive, and plenty more.

Alternatively, you can use webhooks to carry out an action whenever an event occurs, e.g. get a notification whenever YouTube Scraper successfully finishes a run, or initiate a new process, like ordering your data.

Error items

When the scraper cannot retrieve data for a given input — for example a channel does not exist or is age-restricted — it pushes an error item to the dataset instead of silently skipping it. Normal output items are never affected; you can tell them apart by the presence of an error field.

Error item structure

{
"url":"https://www.youtube.com/@somechannel",
"input":"somechannel",
"error":"CHANNEL_DOES_NOT_EXIST",
"note":"Channel does not exist"
}

Error codes reference

❓FAQ

How much does it cost to scrape YouTube channel data?

This scraper uses the pay-per-result pricing model, so your costs can be easily calculated. It will cost you $0.50 to scrape 1,000 search results, so 0.0005 USD per item.

Apify’s Free plan provides $5 free usage credits every month. For that amount, you can get up to 10,000 results from YouTube channels for free. If you need to get more YouTube channels regularly, you should grab an Apify subscription. Each tier gives you discounts on use of Actors, check out how that works for Fast YouTube Channel Scraper on the pricing tab.

Is scraping YouTube channels legal?

Our YouTube scrapers are ethical and do not extract any private user data, such as email addresses, gender, or location. They only extract what the user has chosen to share publicly. However, you should be aware that your results could contain personal data. You should not scrape personal data unless you have a legitimate reason to do so.

If you're unsure whether your reason is legitimate, consult your lawyers. You can also read our blog post on the legality of web scraping and ethical scraping.

Do I need proxies to scrape YouTube channels?

If you run the scraper on the Apify platform, for successful YouTube scraping you will need residential proxies which are included in Apify's monthly Starter plan ($29). For more details about how our pricing works, platform credits, proxies, and usage, see the platform pricing page.

Can I use Fast YouTube Channel Scraper with the API?

Yes. You can do so using Apify API which will enable you to manage, schedule, and run any Apify Actors, including this one. The API also lets you access any datasets, monitor Actor performance, fetch results, create and update versions, and more. To access the API using Node.js, use the apify-client NPM package. To access the API using Python for scraping YouTube channels, use the apify-client PyPi package.

Check out the Apify API reference docs for full details or click on the API tab for code examples.

Can I use YouTube Scraper through an MCP Server?

With Apify API, you can use almost any Actor in conjunction with an MCP server. You can connect to the MCP server using clients like ClaudeDesktop and LibreChat, or even build your own. Read all about how you can set up Apify Actors with MCP.

For YouTube Scraper, go to the MCP tab and then go through the following steps:

1. Start a Server-Sent Events (SSE) session to receive a sessionId
2. Send API messages using that sessionId to trigger the scraper
3. The message starts the Amazon ASINs Scraper with the provided input
4. The response should be: Accepted

How do I scrape comments and likes?

You can get like and comment counts for each video by using the YouTube Scraper. You can also scrape comments of a video with YouTube Comments Scraper.

Your feedback

We’re always working on improving the performance of our Actors. So if you’ve got any technical feedback for Fast YouTube Channel Scraper or simply found a bug, please create an issue on the Actor’s Issues tab.