Douyin Scraper - Hot Topics, Videos, Comments & Creator Leads

Scrape Douyin (抖音) - China's TikTok, 700M+ daily users - without a login, a browser or a Chinese phone number.

Get what is trending in China right now, the videos driving it, exact engagement numbers, the comments underneath (with the commenter's province), and a ranked list of the creators behind it all.

Demand receipt (why this exists). 54 Douyin scrapers on the Apify Store share 5,289 users / 1,110 in the last 30 days, yet no one owns the category: the market leader holds 1,734 users and a 2.7-star rating from 8 reviews. The gap is not reliability - it is that every incumbent is a single-purpose tool (search, or profile, or comments, or a downloader) that returns Douyin's rounded numbers. This actor covers the whole funnel in one run and returns the exact integers.

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What makes this different

	Typical Douyin actor	This actor
Engagement numbers	"22.4万" - Douyin's rounded display value	224405 - the exact integer
Content category	not offered	Douyin's own two-level taxonomy (健身,健身知识)
Comments	text + author	text, exact likes, commenter's province, reply threading, comment IDs
Trending	a separate paid actor	built in - the live hot board with real heat scores
Creator data	follower count, rounded	exact followers + lifetime likes + measured engagement + lead score
Transport	headless browser farms	plain HTTP - no browser, so runs are seconds, not minutes

Why the exact numbers matter: Douyin's page shows 22.4万. Everyone scraping the rendered page ships 224,000. The real figure is 224,405. If you are tracking a campaign day over day, a number rounded to 3 significant figures cannot show you movement until it moves by ~1%.

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What you can pull

1. Hot board - what China is watching right now (mode: hot)

The live 抖音热榜: rank, the trending phrase, Douyin's exact heat score, its badge code, and a link into each topic. Refreshes continuously - run it on a schedule to build a trend time-series nobody else has.

2. Topic videos (mode: topic)

Every video filed under the trending topics, or under any topic URL you supply.

3. Video detail (mode: video)

Paste video URLs or IDs. Accepts /video/, /note/, /light/ links, modal_id= URLs, or bare IDs.

4. Creator / KOL leads (mode: creators)

A deduplicated, ranked creator list built from whoever is currently trending - exact followers, lifetime likes, the categories they post in, average engagement across the videos sampled, and a 0-100 lead score.

5. Discover (mode: discover)

Start from a seed video and crawl outward through Douyin's own related-video rails.

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Output

Video record (abridged)

{
  "type": "video",
  "videoId": "7664908168602158446",
  "url": "https://www.douyin.com/video/7664908168602158446",
  "caption": "广州早茶的厨师是完全沉浸在自己的艺术里面，实物比图片更震撼",
  "category": "美食,美食展示",
  "categoryPrimary": "美食",
  "categorySecondary": "美食展示",
  "hashtags": ["广州早茶"],
  "durationSeconds": 14,
  "publishedAt": "2026-07-21 17:18",
  "uploadDate": "2026-07-21T17:18:23+08:00",
  "likeCount": 397872,
  "commentCount": 21872,
  "collectCount": 15323,
  "repostCount": 622680,
  "statsAreExact": true,
  "likesPerFollower": 380.37,
  "authorNickname": "清纯佳人",
  "authorSecUid": "MS4wLjABAAAAFzId...",
  "authorFollowers": 1046,
  "authorTotalLikes": 411927,
  "coverImage": "https://p3-pc-sign.douyinpic.com/...",
  "embedUrl": "https://www.douyin.com/light/7664908168602158446",
  "comments": [
    {
      "commentId": "7665004744398504761",
      "text": "有钱人就是不一样，629元一个[泣不成声]",
      "likeCount": 72587,
      "likeCountIsExact": true,
      "replyCount": 3429,
      "isReply": false,
      "authorNickname": "路过",
      "region": "广东",
      "postedRelative": "15小时前"
    }
  ],
  "relatedVideoIds": ["7663729471992537769", "..."]
}

likesPerFollower above is 380 - that video reached ~380x its creator's follower count. On Douyin the recommendation feed routinely pushes content far beyond a creator's followers, so this reading is real signal, not an error. It is deliberately not called "engagement rate".

Creator lead record

{
  "type": "creator",
  "nickname": "人民网",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.douyin.com/user/MS4wLjABAAAA-Hb...",
  "followers": 72526125,
  "totalLikes": 4266954195,
  "likesPerFollower": 0.00165,
  "categoryPrimary": "时政社会",
  "avgLikesSampled": 119684,
  "videosSampled": 3,
  "leadScore": 61
}

Hot topic record

{
  "type": "hotTopic",
  "rank": 1,
  "word": "最后一位长征女红军王全英逝世",
  "hotValue": 11850879,
  "badgeCode": 3,
  "sentenceId": "2580391",
  "topicUrl": "https://www.douyin.com/hot/2580391/..."
}

badgeCode is Douyin's own label integer. Douyin publishes no mapping for it, so the raw value is passed through rather than guessed at.

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Who buys this

• Brand & agency teams running China campaigns - track a hashtag or product mention, see which provinces are talking (comments carry the commenter's province).
• KOL / influencer platforms - build and refresh creator databases with exact reach and measured engagement.
• Trend and consumer researchers - schedule the hot board and own a Douyin trend time-series.
• Cross-border e-commerce sellers - find which product content is breaking out before it reaches Western platforms.
• Media monitoring - what is trending in China, in near real time, with heat scores.

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Honest limitations

Stated up front, because a scraper that overpromises wastes your credits:

• No keyword search. Douyin returns an empty body for /search/ on this source. Discovery is via the hot board, topic pages and related-video rails. This actor does not pretend otherwise.
• No profile-by-URL. Creator profile pages also return an empty body. Creator records are built from the creator data embedded in video and topic pages - which is where the exact follower and lifetime-like totals live, so the lead records are complete.
• ~10-12 comments per video. That is what Douyin's public page exposes; it is the top comments plus visible replies, not the full thread.
• The exact counters and the category need the proxy. Douyin serves the page carrying them to residential IPs only. It is on by default and costs one request per video. Switch it off and the run still succeeds - you get rounded engagement numbers, statsAreExact: false, and no category. Everything else is unaffected.
• Chinese-language content. Captions, categories, comments and topics come back in Chinese, as published.

robots.txt is honoured: Douyin names Googlebot and Bingbot with their own rule group, and every path this actor requests is checked against that group's Disallow list at request time. Disallowed paths are skipped, not fetched.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
mode	string	hot	hot, topic, video, creators, discover
videoUrls	array	-	URLs or bare IDs; used by video / discover
topicUrls	array	-	Hot-topic URLs; leave empty to use what is trending now
maxItems	integer	50	0 = no limit (the run-time budget still applies)
hotTopicLimit	integer	25	Topics to read from the hot board (max 60)
videosPerTopic	integer	6	Videos taken per topic
includeComments	boolean	true	Nests comments in the video record
maxCommentsPerVideo	integer	20	Douyin exposes ~10-12
discoverDepth	integer	1	Hops through related-video rails
proxyConfiguration	object	RESIDENTIAL	One request per video; see limitations

Run it with no input at all and it returns the live hot board.

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Use with AI assistants (MCP)

This actor works as a tool for LLM agents through the Apify MCP server - ask your assistant for "what is trending on Douyin right now" or "the top Douyin creators in 美食 this week" and it can call this actor directly.

Agent-ready: autonomous payments (x402 & Skyfire)

This actor is agent-ready — AI agents can discover it, run it, and pay for it autonomously, with no Apify account and no human in the loop. It uses pay-per-event pricing and limited permissions, so it qualifies for Apify's agentic-payment standards:

• x402 — an open, HTTP-native payment protocol. Agents pay per run in USDC on the Base network directly through the Apify MCP server — no account, no API key.
• Skyfire — agent-to-service payments for fully autonomous AI-agent workflows.

Building an AI agent, MCP tool, or autonomous data pipeline? This scraper is ready to plug in and pay as it goes.

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Pricing

Pay per event - you pay for records, never for a run that returns nothing.

Event	Price
Hot topic	$0.002
Video	$0.004
Comment	$0.0005
Creator / KOL lead	$0.004

No start fee, no charge for pagination.

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Legal

Scrapes only data Douyin publishes without a login, on the surface it serves to search-engine crawlers, and honours the Disallow rules for those crawlers. No accounts are created, no login is used, no rate limits are evaded. You are responsible for how you use the output, including GDPR/PIPL obligations where personal data is involved.