Facebook Reels Scrapers: Views, Captions and Transcripts

November 8, 2026

Reels are where most Facebook reach goes for many Pages now, so they are what you want to study. You usually need three things: the list of a Page's reels with view counts, the details of one reel, and what was said in it. Here is what works.

The official route covers only your own Pages

Meta's Reels documentation describes GET /page-id/video_reels to list "all reels published on your Facebook Page", with a Page access token from someone who can perform the CREATE_CONTENT task on that Page Reels docs. In other words, it is for Pages you manage. There is no documented endpoint to list another Page's reels. For other Pages' posts in general you need Page Public Content Access, with App Review and business verification PPCA docs.

yt-dlp for single videos

The open-source downloader yt-dlp lists facebook and facebook:reel among its supported sites supported sites. It is a good free choice when you have a handful of reel URLs and want the file or the basic metadata:

yt-dlp --skip-download --dump-json "https://www.facebook.com/reel/REEL_ID" > reel.json

It works per URL, so it can't tell you which reels a Page has posted. And downloading a video does not give you the right to reuse it. Keep files for analysis, not republishing.

A note on view counts

A reel's view count tells you how often it was played, not how many people watched to the end. Shares and comments are better signs that people actually watched. For your own Page, Meta's insights give you more detail; for other Pages, you only have the public counts.

Metrics worth collecting

Method: find a Page's outlier reels

Average views mislead because one viral reel drags the mean up. Use the median and an outlier ratio.

1. Pull the Page's last 30 to 50 reels with their play counts.
2. Compute the median plays.
3. For each reel, outlier = plays / median.
4. Study anything with an outlier score of 3 or more. Read its transcript and its first three seconds. Those are the ideas that worked for this audience.

import os, statistics, requests

KEY = os.environ["SCRAPEIO_API_KEY"]
H = {"x-api-key": KEY}
page = "https://www.facebook.com/natgeo"

items, cursor = [], None
while len(items) < 50:
    params = {"url": page}
    if cursor:
        params["cursor"] = cursor
    d = requests.get("https://scrapeio.com/v1/facebook/profile/reels",
                     params=params, headers=H, timeout=60).json()["data"]
    items += d["items"]
    if not d["has_more"]:
        break
    cursor = d["cursor"]

plays = [i["plays"] for i in items if i.get("plays")]
median = statistics.median(plays)
for i in sorted(items, key=lambda i: i.get("plays") or 0, reverse=True)[:10]:
    print(round((i["plays"] or 0) / median, 1), i["plays"], i["url"])

Reading what the outliers have in common

Numbers tell you which reels to look at. The transcript and the first frames tell you why they worked. For each outlier, write down:

• The hook: the first sentence spoken or shown on screen.
• The format: talking head, tutorial, behind the scenes, trend remix, clip from a longer video.
• The length, rounded to the nearest 10 seconds.
• The payoff: what the viewer gets by the end, and whether it is promised in the hook.

After ten outliers, patterns show up. You might find that a Page's tutorials under 30 seconds beat everything else, or that its clips from long videos never break out. Compare across Pages only with care: views depend on follower count and on how much Facebook is pushing reels to that audience, so use each Page's own median as the baseline.

Choosing between the options

• Your own Page: use the official Reels API and Meta's insights. You also get retention data no outside tool sees.
• A few reels: yt-dlp is free and good.
• Many Pages on a schedule: a hosted API saves you from maintaining a scraper.

How to do it with ScrapeIO

The Facebook profile videos API lists a Page's videos and reels with plays, the Facebook post API returns one reel by URL with views, reactions, comments, shares and the video URL, and the Facebook post transcript API returns what was said. To find reels on a topic across Pages, try the Facebook video search API. Each call is 1 credit.

Sources

Checked on 8 November 2026 from each vendor's own pages. Prices and limits change; follow the links before you decide.

• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/video-api/guides/reels-publishing/
• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/features-reference/page-public-content-access
• https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/supportedsites.md