How to Scrape YouTube Shorts Data (Exact View, Like & Comment Counts)

If you have ever tried to figure out how to scrape YouTube Shorts data — the view counts, like counts, publish dates, and channel stats for a batch of Shorts — you have probably discovered that it is more annoying than it looks. Shorts are technically just videos, but YouTube treats them as a distinct surface, and the tools most people reach for either cost quota you do not have or return numbers that are rounded and incomplete.

This post walks through the real options: what the official API does and does not give you, how the "internal API" scraping approach actually works, and a runnable example you can drop into a script today.

Why scraping YouTube Shorts data is harder than it should be

The obvious first stop is the YouTube Data API v3. It is a legitimate, well-documented REST API, and for many jobs it is the right tool. But three things make it awkward specifically for Shorts work:

1. Quota. Every Google Cloud project gets a default allocation of 10,000 units per day. That sounds like a lot until you learn the pricing: a search.list call costs 100 units, so you get roughly 100 searches per day before you hit quotaExceeded. A plain videos.list read is only 1 unit, but you can only call it once you already have the video IDs — and getting those IDs by keyword or hashtag is the expensive search step. ( where you paste your inputs and preview the resulting output schema in the browser. It does not fetch live results client-side — YouTube is not CORS-open, so no browser page can — it just helps you construct and understand the request.

   
   
   

   To run it for real against live data, the backing actor is youtube-shorts-scraper-pro on Apify. It is free to start, then pay-as-you-go, and it handles the residential-proxy rotation and the JSON-walking so you do not inherit the breakage treadmill.

   
   
   

   However you go about it, keep it to public data only — public Shorts, public channel stats, public comments — and you have a clean, repeatable way to pull YouTube Shorts data with exact numbers instead of rounded guesses.

   
   
   

   Disclosure: I build and maintain the youtube-shorts-scraper-pro actor referenced above.

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   Ausführliche Details, Code-Beispiele & Hersteller-Stellungnahme auf dev.to.

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