How to Scrape Youtube Channel Data Using Apify, Make and Airtable

I recently discovered a YouTube creator whose content I wanted to analyze for my own channel. Rather than manually gathering all their stats, I built a simple automation that collects channel data with just a click. This setup has saved me hours of research time, and I’m excited to share how you can build it too.

What This Automation Does

With this system, I can paste any YouTube channel URL into my Airtable, click a button, and watch as it automatically fills in key information like:

Subscriber count
Total video count
Channel description
Join date
And more

The whole process takes seconds instead of the manual searching I used to do. In one recent example, the automation pulled data showing a channel had 929,000 subscribers and 1,566 videos.

How I Built It

The magic happens through a combination of Airtable, Apify scrapers, and Make (formerly Integromat). Here’s how I set it up:

The Trigger: When I click the “Channel” button in Airtable, it sends the record ID to my automation.
Data Lookup: The automation finds the corresponding row and grabs either the full YouTube URL or just the channel handle (like @PeterMD).
Smart Handling: My system is flexible – it can work with either a complete URL or just the handle. If I only provide the handle, it automatically creates the full URL by adding “youtube.com/@” before it.
Error Prevention: I built in checks to make sure there’s either a URL or handle before continuing. If both are missing, it sends back an error message and stops.
The Scraping: Once it has a valid URL, the system calls the Apify scraper, which goes out and collects all the channel data.
Data Storage: Finally, it updates my Airtable row with everything: channel name, tags, links, subscriber count, video count, description, and join date.

Why This Matters For Content Creators

As someone who studies other creators’ performance, having quick access to channel stats helps me spot trends and opportunities. I can easily compare metrics across different channels, track growth over time, and identify what’s working in my niche.

Before building this automation, I’d spend hours manually researching channels. Now I can analyze dozens in the same amount of time.

Getting Started

If you want to try this yourself, you’ll need accounts with Airtable, Apify, and Make. The basic versions of these tools should be enough to get started. The setup is straightforward once you understand how the pieces connect together.

The most important part is structuring your Airtable correctly with columns for URL, subscriber count, video count, and other metrics you want to track.

This automation has completely changed how I research other YouTube channels. Not only does it save me time, but it gives me more accurate data to base my content decisions on. If you analyze YouTube channels regularly, building something similar could be a game-changer for your workflow.