YouTube, Shorts

A YouTube Shorts scraper for channels, searches and link lists

Give it channels, keywords or Shorts links and get one row per Short: views, likes, comment count, publish date, length, channel and subscribers, hashtags, the song it uses and the thumbnail. $1.30 per 1,000 Shorts on the Free plan, with no login, cookies or API key.

• $1.30 per 1,000 Shorts (Free plan)
• Channels, search or links
• "Newer than" to the day
• No login or API key

Three ways in

maxResults caps the Shorts per channel or search. Mix all three inputs in one run; many channels and searches are read side by side, and each Short appears once per run even if two inputs find it.

What each row holds

"Newer than" works to the day

newerThan takes a date (2026-09-01) or a period (7 days, today) and keeps only Shorts published on or after that day. YouTube shows a Short's publish date, not its time, so the filter works to the day: a period counts back to the start of that calendar day in UTC, which means 1 hour keeps everything published today. With a date set, channels are read newest first and stop at the date. Shorts older than the date are never charged.

What it costs

On the Free plan, the latest 20 Shorts of one channel cost $0.0273; 1,000 Shorts from one channel cost $1.3013; and an hourly check of 10 channels that finds nothing new costs $0.0040 per run. Channels that don't exist and a channel given twice cost nothing, and regular videos are never charged as Shorts. Set a maximum cost per run and the Actor stops before going over it.

Compared with the most-used Shorts Actor

streamers/youtube-shorts-scraper has no start or per-channel charge, and lists a date-filter event ($0.0013 on Free) that is charged when you filter by date. For the latest 20 Shorts of one channel on Free, that is $0.08 there and $0.0273 here. It also has a far longer track record; ours is new, so check the run statistics on its Store page and start with a small run. If you're moving from another Shorts scraper on Apify, its common input names for channels, limits, dates and sort order are accepted as they are; the Actor's README lists them. The YouTube scrapers comparison puts both next to the video scrapers.

What it doesn't do

• No video files, captions, transcripts or comment text. It reads each Short's public details only.
• Search is personalised. YouTube reshuffles search results, so you get what a logged-out visitor in your country sees, not what your own app shows. Channel Shorts tabs are the same for everyone.
• Public Shorts only. Nothing private or members-only, and nothing behind a login.

For regular videos, the YouTube Scraper covers searches, channels' Videos tabs, playlists and video links; see channel videos to CSV and the Data API alternative.

What people use it for

• Competitor Shorts tracking. Schedule a list of channels with newerThan: "today"; each run returns that day's Shorts, and a channel with nothing new costs $0.0003.
• Bulk views checks. Paste a list of Shorts links to get current views, likes and comment counts in one table.
• Trend and hashtag research. Shorts search by popularity for a keyword or #hashtag, in the country you choose.
• Music research. See which songs the top Shorts in a niche use.
• Datasets. engagementRate and viewsPerDay are already computed for every row.

Run it from code

The latest 50 Shorts from one channel: one channel checked, 50 Shorts and the run start, $0.0663 on the Free plan.

// Save as run.mjs, then: npm i apify-client && APIFY_TOKEN=... node run.mjs
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });

const run = await client.actor('yugenox/youtube-shorts-scraper').call({
  channels: [
    "@NASA"
  ],
  maxResults: 50
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
for (const item of items) console.log(item.url, item.viewCount, item.likes);

import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient  # pip install apify-client

client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])

run = client.actor("yugenox/youtube-shorts-scraper").call(run_input={
    "channels": ["@NASA"],
    "maxResults": 50,
})
if run is None:
    raise RuntimeError("Run did not finish")

for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item.get("url"), item.get("viewCount"), item.get("likes"))

# Small jobs: runs the Actor and returns the rows in one call (up to 5 minutes).
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/yugenox~youtube-shorts-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"channels":["@NASA"],"maxResults":50}'

Last updated 2026-10-06.