YouTube Profile & Channel List Scraper

Scrapes YouTube channel profiles and video lists. It extracts channel metadata, subscriber counts, and video data, optionally including full video transcripts and comments via the Transcript Downloader API. Useful for content research, competitor analysis, and data aggregation.

Key Features

• Channel Data: Extracts profile metadata, subscriber count, total views, and creation date.
• Video Lists: Fetches all videos from a channel with basic info (title, thumbnail, publish date).
• Detailed Video Metadata: Optional fetch of full transcripts, view/like counts, and comments.
• Batch Processing: Handles multiple channel URLs simultaneously.
• Managed Execution: Includes concurrency control, automatic retries, rate limiting, and cost tracking.

How to Use

Configure the actor with input parameters and run it. Results are stored as dataset items in Apify, which can be downloaded as JSON, CSV, or via API.

Input

The actor requires an apiToken from Transcript Downloader and a list of channelUrls. Channel URLs can be in the format https://www.youtube.com/@username or https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID.

Example Input

{
  "channelUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/@google",
    "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK8sQmJBp8GCxrOtXWBpyEA"
  ],
  "apiToken": "your-api-token",
  "includeVideoDetails": false,
  "maxConcurrency": 2
}

Output

Each channel generates a dataset item containing the channel profile, a list of videos, and a processing summary.

Basic Output Structure

{
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@google",
  "profile": {
    "title": "Google",
    "subscriber_count": 5000000,
    "total_views": 100000000,
    "creation_date": "2005-02-14 23:41:51"
    // ... other metadata
  },
  "videos": [
    {
      "youtube_id": "abc123",
      "title": "Video Title",
      "published_at": "2024-01-01 12:00:00"
      // ... basic video info
    }
  ],
  "summary": {
    "totalVideos": 1234,
    "totalCost": "0.500",
    "processingTime": "15.2s"
  }
}

With Detailed Video Metadata

When includeVideoDetails is true, each video object includes a detailedMetadata field with:
* Full description, view count, like count, comment count.
* Complete video transcript (with optional timestamps).
* Comments (if includeComments is also true).