Developer guide · 2026

How to Scrape YouTube Videos and Channels at Scale

Pull video stats, channel data and search results without the official API quota — free to start.

Start free on Apify →

The official YouTube Data API has tight daily quotas that run out fast for any serious research or monitoring project. Scaling past them means juggling multiple keys and projects.

Scraping the public pages instead gives you the same data with no quota ceiling. You can do all of it with a maintained YouTube Actor on Apify — no servers, no proxies, callable as an API.

What you can do with a YouTube scraper

Competitor researchTrack how channels in your niche grow, post and perform.
Content strategyMine top videos and titles for a query to reverse-engineer what works.
Trend analysisFollow views and engagement on topics over time.
Creator discoveryBuild lists of channels by topic for outreach or partnerships.

Step-by-step

1

Pick a YouTube Actor

Open Apify Store and choose a maintained YouTube scraper that returns videos, channels or search results with stats.

2

Set channels or search terms

Enter the channel URLs, search keywords or video URLs and how many items to fetch. Run it with no code.

3

Run and read results

Download the dataset or call the API from your app to refresh the data on a schedule.

Call it from your own code

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/YOUR_ACTOR_ID/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "searchKeywords": ["faceless youtube"], "maxResults": 100 }'

The response is clean JSON you can drop straight into your app, a notebook, or a spreadsheet. Export as CSV or Excel with one query parameter.

Start building for free

Apify's free tier includes monthly platform credits — enough to run your first YouTube scrapes at no cost. Pay only for what you extract after that.

Create free Apify account →

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