How to Scrape Snapchat Spotlight Comments for Social Research

Understanding audience sentiment on short-form video platforms is essential for social media managers, brand researchers, and competitive intelligence analysts. While platforms like TikTok and Instagram get heavy attention, Snapchat Spotlight has grown into a massive hub for viral content and consumer reactions.

However, gathering audience feedback from Snapchat has historically been difficult. Spotlight comment threads are typically locked inside the mobile app experience, making it challenging to extract feedback at scale for competitive analysis, campaign auditing, or creator performance tracking.

The Snapchat Spotlight Comments Scraper solves this issue by extracting public comment threads directly from Snapchat Spotlight into structured datasets—no browser automation, login credentials, or session cookies required.

Why Extract Snapchat Spotlight Comments?

Spotlight comments provide direct insight into what audiences think about specific products, influencers, and viral trends. By scraping these comment feeds, teams can unlock several key workflows:

• Influencer and Creator Auditing: Monitor audience reactions across a creator's pinned Spotlight videos to assess audience sentiment before booking brand sponsorships.
• Competitor Feedback Analysis: Extract comments from competing brand campaigns to see what users praise, criticize, or ask for in product demos.
• Multilingual Sentiment Research: Analyze global conversations. The scraper fully decodes non-ASCII characters, allowing researchers to capture feedback written in Arabic, Urdu, emoji, and other languages without character corruption.
• Engagement Ranking Evaluation: Study Snapchat's internal algorithmic ranking score to understand which types of user responses gain the highest visibility.

How the Snapchat Spotlight Comments Scraper Works

Snapchat embeds public comment data as base64-encoded JSON directly inside public page HTML. The scraper decodes this structured payload directly without launching resource-heavy headless browsers.

The tool provides two flexible scraping strategies depending on your research needs:

1. By Creator Username (byUsername)

In this mode, the scraper visits a creator's public profile page. A single request retrieves the comments embedded across all of the creator's pinned Spotlight videos at once. This mode is the fastest way to audit a creator's top content.

2. By Spotlight Video URL (bySpotlightUrl)

If you need comments from specific individual videos—especially those that are not pinned on a creator's profile page—you can provide direct video URLs (e.g., https://www.snapchat.com/spotlight/{id}) to fetch comments video by video.

Key Data Fields Extracted

Each extracted comment is pushed as an individual structured record to your Apify dataset. Key fields include:

• replyText: The raw comment text, preserving complete Unicode, emoji, and non-English scripts.
• commenterDisplayName: The public display name of the user who commented.
• commenterBitmojiAvatarId and commenterBitmojiSelfieId: The commenter's unique Bitmoji identifiers.
• reactionCounts: An array of reaction objects containing reactTypeId and the associated count of user reactions.
• rankingScore: Snapchat's internal ranking score assigned to that specific comment.
• threadedReplyCount: The number of nested replies under the comment thread.
• approvalState: The internal moderation state code (a value of 3 indicates an approved, publicly visible comment).
• postedAt: The exact ISO 8601 UTC timestamp when the user posted the comment.
• sourceUsername or inputUrl: Contextual metadata showing where the comment originated.

If a video has disabled comments or no public comments available, the actor outputs a structured error record containing error details and scrapedAt timestamps instead of failing the run.

Step-by-Step: How to Scrape Spotlight Comments

Setting up a scrape takes only a few minutes:

Step 1: Select Your Scraping Mode

Decide whether you want to target specific videos or an entire creator profile. Set the mode parameter to either byUsername or bySpotlightUrl.

Step 2: Provide Your Target Inputs

Depending on the chosen mode, populate the corresponding input field:

• For byUsername, enter one or more creator handles into the usernames array (e.g., ["waqarzaka", "brentrivera"]).
• For bySpotlightUrl, paste your direct video links into the spotlightUrls array.

Step 3: Set Extraction Limits

Configure the maxCommentsPerSnap parameter to define how many comments to pull per Spotlight snap (supports values from 1 up to 1,000; defaults to 100). Snapchat embeds a curated set of top-ranked comments per video.

Step 4: Run the Scraper and Export Data

Optionally configure proxyConfiguration if routing through custom proxies, then start the run. Once finished, you can download your clean comment dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel, or export it to downstream analytics tools via API or webhooks.

Start Collecting Snapchat Engagement Data

Whether you are monitoring influencer brand safety, tracking audience sentiment across viral campaigns, or researching social trends across multiple languages, the Snapchat Spotlight Comments Scraper gives you quick, structured access to public comment data without authentication hurdles.

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Ready to try it yourself? Run *Snapchat Spotlight Comments Scraper** on the Apify Store -- no setup required.*