🎬 Douban Tracker — China Movie & TV Ratings + Hot Lists (豆瓣)

Optional delivery: Send results straight to your own Notion database or Supabase table in the same run, via Apify's native MCP connectors — the Actor never sees your credentials. One-click connect: Notion or Supabase. Leave blank to get the dataset as usual.

Pull Douban (豆瓣) movie and TV ratings, hot lists, and Top 250 rankings as clean structured data — the China cultural-zeitgeist source that almost no Western scraper can reach. Douban is rate-sensitive and anti-bot defended; this actor clears it through residential proxy and Douban's own open rated-list endpoint, returning title, rating, rank, Douban ID, cover art, and direct subject URLs as flat JSON / CSV / Excel. No login, no Chinese phone number, no Douban API key.

If you do APAC market research, content licensing, entertainment analytics, or simply need to know what China is actually watching and rating right now, this is the data feed — and it's genuinely hard to get anywhere else.

📊 Sample Output

Real titles returned by this actor for category: movie, listType: hot — every row below comes straight from a live run on the Chinese-language Douban hot list:

#	Title (电影)	Rating	Douban ID	Subject URL
1	大濛	8.0	36680492	movie.douban.com/subject/36680492/
2	木挽町复仇记	7.2	37516907	movie.douban.com/subject/37516907/
3	单程夜航	6.8	38407729	movie.douban.com/subject/38407729/
4	我的妈耶	6.6	36217763	movie.douban.com/subject/36217763/
5	幽旅巫咒	6.1	37226826	movie.douban.com/subject/37226826/
6	杀木池	5.3	37233517	movie.douban.com/subject/37233517/
7	世界的主人	9.1	37116612	movie.douban.com/subject/37116612/
8	女士优先	6.3	37067461	movie.douban.com/subject/37067461/
9	双喜	7.5	36576765	movie.douban.com/subject/36576765/
10	家弑服务	7.1	36367195	movie.douban.com/subject/36367195/

Each title also carries a high-resolution cover_image poster URL and the original Chinese title — handy for building content catalogs, recommendation datasets, or licensing trackers.

What you get

Per title, you get a flat, typed record:

• Identity — title (Chinese), original_title, douban_id, douban_url (direct subject page)
• Score — rating (Douban's 10-point score), rating_count where Douban exposes it on the endpoint
• Ranking — rank (position in the requested list), list_type, category
• Metadata — year, genres[], director, author, artist, is_new, playable (populated where the endpoint returns them)
• Media — cover_image (high-res poster URL)
• Reference — summary, data_source, scraped_at

Note: Douban's open hot-list endpoint returns title, rating, cover_image, douban_id, and douban_url for every item. Fields like rating_count, year, and genres are only populated when you query the Top 250 / detail-backed lists or a specific query; on the lightweight hot list they may be empty. We never fabricate fields the source doesn't return.

Sample inputs

1. China movie hot list (what's hot right now)

{ "category": "movie", "listType": "hot", "maxItems": 12 }

2. The Douban Top 250 (the canonical China film ranking)

{ "category": "movie", "listType": "top250", "maxItems": 100 }

3. TV dramas, now playing

{ "category": "tv", "listType": "now-playing", "maxItems": 40 }

4. Keyword title lookup (works across categories)

{ "category": "movie", "query": "流浪地球", "maxItems": 20 }

📊 Sample Output (JSON)

One representative record, straight from a live run:

{
  "category": "movie",
  "list_type": "hot",
  "title": "大濛",
  "original_title": "大濛",
  "rating": 8.0,
  "rating_count": null,
  "year": null,
  "genres": [],
  "cover_image": "https://img3.doubanio.com/view/photo/s_ratio_poster/public/p2925804842.jpg",
  "douban_id": "36680492",
  "douban_url": "https://movie.douban.com/subject/36680492/",
  "rank": 0,
  "data_source": "douban.com/j/search_subjects",
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-15T04:07:16Z"
}

How it works

Douban (豆瓣) is one of the most anti-bot-defended sites in the Chinese web — datacenter IPs get rate-limited and challenged almost immediately. This actor routes through Apify residential proxy and reads movie/TV lists from Douban's own open search_subjects rated-list endpoint rather than scraping anti-bot-defended HTML list pages. That keeps it fast, low-compute, and reliable while returning clean flat fields. The maxItems cap (1–200) is a hard ceiling — compute never outruns it. Book and music categories are supported via keyword query only, since their list pages are more heavily defended.

💰 Pricing example

This actor uses Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for what actually lands in your dataset:

• Actor start: $0.005
• Per item: $0.05

A 100-title pull = $0.005 + (100 × $0.05) = $5.01. A quick 12-title hot-list check = $0.005 + (12 × $0.05) = $0.605. No monthly minimum, no seats, no surprise overage bills.

🌏 Unique APAC content data

This is unique China-market data. Douban is the rating and review authority for film, TV, books, and music among Chinese audiences — there is no Western equivalent that carries the same cultural weight, and almost no general-purpose scraper can reach it reliably. If you're tracking what China watches and rates, this feed is genuinely hard to source anywhere else.

⚖️ Legal & ToS

This actor reads only Douban's public, unauthenticated rated-list endpoints — the same ratings and rankings any visitor sees without logging in. It collects public rating and catalog metadata. It does not access private user accounts, reviews behind login, or anything requiring authentication. You are responsible for using the output in line with Douban's terms and your local regulations.

❓ FAQ

Q: Do I need a Douban account or a Chinese phone number? A: No. The actor works entirely off Douban's public rated-list endpoints — no login, no registration, no Chinese SIM.

Q: Why are year, genres, or rating_count sometimes empty? A: Douban's lightweight hot-list endpoint only returns title, rating, cover_image, and IDs. Richer metadata appears on the Top 250 / detail-backed lists and keyword query lookups. We never fabricate fields the source doesn't expose.

Q: Can I get the Douban Top 250? A: Yes — set listType: "top250" with category: "movie". That returns the canonical high-rated China film ranking.

Q: Do book and music work? A: Books (图书) and music (音乐) are supported via keyword query search only — their list pages are too heavily anti-bot-defended to enumerate. Movie and TV support the full list endpoints.

Q: Why did I get fewer items than maxItems? A: That list simply had fewer entries available. maxItems is a ceiling, not a target — getting fewer is normal, not an error.

🔗 Related Actors

Pair this with the rest of the NexGenData APAC data stack:

• 📈 China Trends Tracker — Weibo / Baidu / Douyin Hot Topics — track what's trending across China's biggest platforms in one feed
• 🔥 Weibo Hot Search Tracker — Real-Time China Trending — the live Weibo 热搜 leaderboard as structured data
• 📺 Bilibili Video Search — China's YouTube/Niconico — search and rank Bilibili videos with view, like, and creator stats
• 🏢 About NexGenData — we maintain 260+ production Apify actors for lead-gen, competitive intelligence, and hard-to-reach APAC web data. Browse the full catalog at apify.com/nexgendata.

---

⭐ Found this useful?

If this actor saved you research time, a quick review on the Apify Store helps other teams discover it. Feature request or bug? Open it from the Issues tab — we read every one.