YouTube Shorts Sponsorship Signals Scraper

What this Actor scrapes

Influencer-intel SaaS dashboards charge $200–2 000/mo to tell agencies which creators run paid placements. This Actor surfaces the same signal from public data for a fraction of the cost. For every recent Short on a channel it pulls the title, view count, duration, tags, description, and — crucially — the spoken transcript, then scores how likely the Short is sponsored and lists the exact phrases that fired.

Shorts descriptions are mostly empty, so caption-only scrapers miss most deals. We read what the creator actually *says*, which is where Shorts sponsorships live.

What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint impersonation — curl-cffi mimics a real Chrome TLS + HTTP/2 handshake, so YouTube sees a browser, not a bot.
• 🍪 Consent-gate handling — we send the consent cookie YouTube requires before it will list a channel's Shorts. Skip it and you get zero results; we don't skip it.
• 🗣️ Transcript-first detection — spoken sponsor language is the primary signal, caught even when the description is blank.
• 🌐 Optional proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — datacenter is fine at low volume; residential scales it up.
• 🧱 Graceful degradation — a Short with no captions still emits a row (has_transcript: false) instead of crashing the run.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for Shorts that land in your dataset.

Use cases

• Influencer-agency intel — see which creators run brand deals and which brands keep coming back.
• Competitive brand monitoring — track where a competitor's products show up across creators' Shorts.
• Sponsorship benchmarking — measure how often a niche's top channels run paid placements.
• Disclosure compliance audits — flag Shorts with spoken sponsorships but no #ad disclosure.
• Creator vetting — gauge a channel's commercial density before signing a deal.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "channels": [
    "@mkbhd"
  ],
  "maxShortsPerChannel": 20,
  "language": "en",
  "minSponsorshipScore": 0.0,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

channelvideo_idurltitleview_countlength_secondshas_transcripthashtagsmentionsdetected_brandssponsorship_signalssponsorship_scoreis_likely_sponsored

{
  "channel": "@mkbhd",
  "video_id": "n3V3LZh_r40",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n3V3LZh_r40",
  "title": "My everyday carry, sponsored",
  "published_text": null,
  "view_count": 2805352,
  "length_seconds": 58,
  "description": "#ad",
  "tags": [
    "tech",
    "edc"
  ],
  "has_transcript": true,
  "transcript_chars": 712,
  "hashtags": [
    "#ad"
  ],
  "mentions": [],
  "detected_brands": [
    "Surfshark",
    "MARQUES"
  ],
  "sponsorship_signals": [
    "this video is sponsored",
    "use code",
    "#ad"
  ],
  "sponsorship_score": 1.0,
  "is_likely_sponsored": true,
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-13T10:00:00+00:00"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.