YouTube Channel & Video Scraper (No API Key) 🎬

Scrape YouTube channels and videos without an API key — no quota, no OAuth, no Google Cloud project. Pull the latest videos from any channel or playlist with views, likes, descriptions, thumbnails and publish dates, or fetch clean metadata for any list of video URLs. Fast, cheap and datacenter-proxy friendly (works great on the free tier).

Built on YouTube's public RSS feeds + oEmbed endpoint. Stable, lightweight, and no key to leak or rate-limit.

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✨ What you get

• Channel / playlist mode — give any channel id (UC...) or playlist id (PL...), get its latest ~15 videos with view counts and like counts straight from YouTube's feed.
• Videos mode — give a list of video ids or watch/youtu.be/shorts URLs, get title, channel, author URL and thumbnail via oEmbed.
• Clean, flat JSON — ready for Google Sheets, Excel, a database, or a training dataset.
• No API key, no login, datacenter-friendly so it runs cheaply.

💸 Pricing

Roughly $0.50 per 1,000 videos — deliberately priced to undercut the expensive key-based YouTube scrapers. Datacenter proxies are fine, so your compute stays cheap.

🚀 Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	channel (latest videos per channel/playlist) or videos (metadata per video).
channelIds	array	Channel ids (UC...) or playlist ids (PL...). Used in channel mode.
videoUrls	array	Video ids or full URLs. Used in videos mode.
maxItems	integer	Cap on total records (default 100, max 1000).

Example — channel mode

{
  "mode": "channel",
  "channelIds": ["UC_x5XG1OV2P6uZZ5FSM9Ttw"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Example — videos mode

{
  "mode": "videos",
  "videoUrls": ["dQw4w9WgXcQ", "https://youtu.be/9bZkp7q19f0"]
}

📤 Output

Each item is one video:

{
  "type": "video",
  "video_id": "iOK1-b_9Dlg",
  "title": "Get started with the Interactions API",
  "channel": "Google for Developers",
  "channel_id": "UC_x5XG1OV2P6uZZ5FSM9Ttw",
  "author_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_x5XG1OV2P6uZZ5FSM9Ttw",
  "published": "2026-07-17T23:00:34+00:00",
  "updated": "2026-07-17T23:23:38+00:00",
  "views": 3042,
  "likes": 146,
  "description": "The Interactions API has reached general availability...",
  "thumbnail": "https://i2.ytimg.com/vi/iOK1-b_9Dlg/hqdefault.jpg",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOK1-b_9Dlg",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-19T20:00:00+00:00"
}

In videos mode, views/likes/description come back as null (oEmbed does not expose them) while title, channel, author_url and thumbnail are populated.

🎯 Use cases

• Influencer research — pull a creator's latest uploads and view counts to size their reach.
• Content monitoring — track new videos from channels you care about on a schedule.
• Competitor intelligence — benchmark rival channels' upload cadence and engagement.
• Datasets — build training/analytics datasets of titles, descriptions and stats.

🆚 Why this actor?

	This actor	Key-based YouTube scrapers
API key / OAuth	❌ Not needed	✅ Required
Daily quota	❌ None	⚠️ 10k units/day
Datacenter proxy	✅ Works	⚠️ Often blocked
Price	💲 ~$0.50 / 1k	💲💲 Higher
Views & likes	✅ (channel mode)	✅

🔗 Related actors by the same author

• TikTok Scraper
• Instagram Scraper
• Twitch Channel Scraper
• Reddit Scraper

Keywords: youtube scraper, youtube channel scraper, youtube video scraper, youtube views scraper, youtube without api key, youtube rss, youtube oembed, video metadata, influencer research, content monitoring.

⚖️ Legal

Only public data is collected via YouTube's own public RSS and oEmbed endpoints. Respect YouTube's Terms of Service and applicable laws when using the output.