YouTube Channel Scraper

The YouTube Channel Scraper is a Claude skill that pulls every video off a YouTube channel into a single spreadsheet — title, views, publish date, duration, the whole catalog. Hundreds of videos. About a minute.

The Problem

You opened a competitor's YouTube channel because you wanted to know what's actually working in your niche. Fair question. So you start scrolling.

The thumbnails load in chunks. You right-click a video, copy the URL into a sheet. Click back. Scroll past the ones you've already logged. Right-click the next one. Copy the title. Paste. Did you grab the view count or not? You forget. You scroll back up. YouTube has reset the page. Now you're hovering over thumbnails trying to remember which ones you already copied.

Two hours in, you have 40 rows. The channel has 400 videos. You haven't even started sorting by view count or noticing the patterns — which is, you know, the entire reason you opened the channel.

This skill eliminates that grind.

What this Claude skill does

Pulls every video on a channel: title, video ID, URL, publish date, duration, view count, like count, comment count, tags, description, language, category — 17 columns total.
Takes any kind of channel link: @MrBeast, the full channel URL, the raw UC… ID, or the legacy /c/Name URL.
Writes to the format that fits the job: markdown by default for skimming in chat, CSV when you want to sort, XLSX when a stakeholder is waiting.
Caps the run when specified: Just ask it to limit the fetch when you only need the last 100 uploads or you're testing a new channel for the first time.
Flags Shorts separately: every video less than 60s gets an is_short=TRUE column so you can filter the noise out of the long-form picture.
Bundles a Channel summary tab: XLSX output ships with subscriber count, total views, total videos, and a fetched-at timestamp on a second sheet.

Why it's amazing!

Turn a two-hour scroll into a one-minute run.
Stop right-clicking thumbnails into a spreadsheet.
Sort the entire catalog by view count and watch the patterns surface.
Hand a clean XLSX to a stakeholder without doing the formatting yourself.

Who it's for

Anyone studying a YouTube channel. Founders running a competitor teardown, content strategists auditing a niche, agencies building a swipe file of high-performing video topics, creators benchmarking their own back catalog, marketers researching where the views actually live. Anyone who's lost an afternoon scrolling a channel page trying to build a video list by hand.

How it works

Ask Claude something like:

"Scrape every video from @MrBeast."
"Pull the last 50 videos off https://www.youtube.com/@hubermanlab as a CSV."
"I'm researching the productivity YouTube niche — grab the catalogs for @AliAbdaal, @ThomasFrank, and @MattDAvella as XLSX files."
"Get me the full @SamOvens video list and sort it by view count so I can see what's actually working."
"Download every video from UCxxxxxx as markdown and skip the descriptions."
"Audit the top 100 newest videos on @ThePrimeagen so I can find which topics keep hitting."

You'll get back a file like this:

Channel: @AliAbdaal
Subscribers: 5.6M
Total videos: 712
Fetched: 2026-05-28

| # | Title                          | Published  | Duration | Views | Likes |
|---|--------------------------------|------------|----------|-------|-------|
| 1 | The 7-Day Productivity Reset   | 2026-05-20 | 12:43    | 284K  | 18K   |
| 2 | I Tried Cal Newport's System   | 2026-05-13 | 18:21    | 412K  | 26K   |
| 3 | Why I Quit My Morning Routine  | 2026-05-06 | 9:17     | 891K  | 54K   |
| 4 | The Productivity Pyramid       | 2026-04-29 | 22:05    | 367K  | 21K   |
| 5 | Stop Reading Self-Help Books   | 2026-04-22 | 11:42    | 1.2M  | 78K   |

Pair it with /youtube-transcript-generator on the top performers when you want the full text of the videos that won.

Pairs well with these other skills

This scraper hands you the catalog and the numbers — these skills go deeper on the videos that stand out:

YouTube Transcript Generator Skill: Sort the catalog by views, then pull the full transcript of the top performers to see exactly what they said.
YouTube Comments Scraper Skill: Grab the comments on the videos that hit to mine what the audience actually responded to.
Competitor Teardown Skill: Audit a competitor's channel here, then tear down their website to see their full content-to-funnel picture.
Content Ideas Generator Skill: Once the high-view topics surface, turn the winning patterns into a list of videos and posts you could make next.

FAQ

Does it cost anything to run?

It runs on your Claude subscription plus a free external API key — no extra subscription, no credit card. The API ships with a generous free plan that covers a daily quota of 10,000 units, which is enough for about 245 full scrapes of a 1,000-video channel per day. Small channels barely touch it.

How accurate is the data?

The view, like, and comment counts come straight from YouTube, so they match what the channel page shows you right now. Titles, durations, tags, and descriptions are pulled from the same source.

Can it track views over time?

No. The API only returns current values, not history. If you need view-over-time data, run the scrape on a schedule and snapshot the output yourself.

Does it grab the transcript or captions?

No. Transcripts aren't included, pair it with the YouTube Transcript Generator Skill for that, run per video on the ones you actually want to read.

Does it grab the comments?

No. Per-video comments aren't included, use the YouTube Comments Scraper Skill on the videos you care about.

What about private, deleted, or region-locked videos?

The API only returns public videos. Anything hidden gets silently skipped, but the script reports a missing: count to stderr so you know if a channel has any.

Does it pick up YouTube Shorts?

Yes. Shorts are flagged with is_short=TRUE (any video ≤60 seconds) so you can filter them in or out of the spreadsheet.

How many channels can I scrape in one day?

Plenty. A 1,000-video channel uses about 41 of your 10,000 daily quota units. You'd have to scrape several hundred channels before you hit the wall.

Safe To Install

Please read before installing. Any skill you copy online is someone else's code running inside your Claude, and a lot of what's out there should give you pause. Most authors who give skills away don't give a second thought to quality or security. Most are vibe-coded slop pushed out untested, and some are the occasional bad actor hiding an exploit in plain sight. (Read about OpenClaws ClawHub security nightmare). Every skill we publish is vetted by a programmer with 20+ years of professional experience and checked line by line for anything that touches your files without reason. With Stim-Pack Studios Claude Skills, you get peace of mind knowing you're installing safe, vetted code, not a stranger's guess.

Add it to your Claude workflow

If you're tired of right-clicking thumbnails into a spreadsheet, this skill is for you. It collapses the YouTube research grind into one prompt and one file.

Get the YouTube Channel Scraper Claude skill and audit any channel in a minute.