# Medium Article Extractor (`extremescrapes/medium-article-extractor`) Actor

Extract news articles as clean, ad-free Markdown with automatic author and publish date detection.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/extremescrapes/medium-article-extractor.md
- **Developed by:** [Extreme Scrapes](https://apify.com/extremescrapes) (community)
- **Categories:** AI, News, Social media
- **Features:** Limited permissions
- **Stats:** 9 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $50.00 / 1,000 result extracteds

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## Medium Article Extractor

Extract Medium articles as clean Markdown — strips clap buttons, navigation bars, social actions, and paywall UI. Get pure article content with auto-generated image captions.

### Features

- **Paywall bypass** — extracts content as rendered, stripping Medium's UI noise
- **Clean output** — removes claps, nav, social actions, footer CTAs
- **Image captions** — auto-generates alt text for images without captions
- **Works with custom domains** — handles Medium-hosted blogs on custom domains
- **Batch processing** — extract multiple articles in a single run

### How It Works

1. Provide Medium article URLs as input.
2. The Actor fetches each article, stripping all Medium UI elements.
3. Clean article content with image captions is converted to Markdown.
4. Results are stored in the Apify dataset.

### Input

```json
{
    "startUrls": [
        { "url": "https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35" },
        { "url": "https://towardsdatascience.com/some-article-123abc" }
    ]
}
```

### Output

```json
{
    "url": "https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35",
    "markdown": "# Software 2.0\n\nArticle content..."
}
```

### Use Cases

- Archive Medium articles before they go behind paywall
- Build datasets from technical blogs on Medium
- Extract content for newsletter curation
- Feed articles into summarization pipelines

### Keywords

medium scraper, medium article extractor, medium to markdown, medium parser, medium blog scraper

### Pricing

$50 per 1,000 article extractions.

# Actor input Schema

## `startUrls` (type: `array`):

URLs of Medium articles to extract.

## `maxRequestsPerCrawl` (type: `integer`):

Maximum number of requests that can be made by this crawler.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35"
    }
  ],
  "maxRequestsPerCrawl": 100
}
```

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "startUrls": [
        {
            "url": "https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35"
        }
    ]
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("extremescrapes/medium-article-extractor").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35" }] }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("extremescrapes/medium-article-extractor").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35"
    }
  ]
}' |
apify call extremescrapes/medium-article-extractor --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,extremescrapes/medium-article-extractor"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/hIJe94cw6KhCz60K4/builds/qLLmif2VNLhbNkA2w/openapi.json