How to scrape accurate daily view counts for 500–1000 Facebook videos/reels on own public page without Graph API?
03:08 14 Aug 2026

I need to track daily view counts for 500–1,000 public Facebook video and reel URLs from our own page.

Constraint: Strictly no Meta Graph API due to app approval and token access restrictions.

What We've Tried & Issues Encountered

  • yt-dlp / Metadata Scraping: Fails on /share/p/ post links with login errors. For Reels, it returns stale/cached crawler metrics (e.g., extracting 271 views when the live page badge displays 652 total plays).

  • Headless Browsers (Playwright/Selenium): Too fragile at this scale due to bot fingerprinting, dynamic CSS class changes, and rapid cookie invalidation.

Questions

  1. How can we fetch the live, aggregated Reel/Video play count without rendering full browser pages?

  2. Beyond third party scraping vendors (Apify, Bright Data), what is the most reliable in-house architecture to process 1,000 URLs daily without getting blocked?

    Thanks

python facebook web-scraping playwright