# Changelog of Douyin Scraper โ€” TikTok China API & Video Downloader (`sian.agency/douyin-scraper`) Actor - **URL**: https://apify.com/sian.agency/douyin-scraper/changelog.md - **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/sian.agency/douyin-scraper.md ## Changelog All notable changes to **Douyin Scraper** will be documented in this file. ### \[2026-08-24] #### ๐Ÿ“Š A run report that shows what you got, not just that it finished - **Results you can paste straight out** โ€” every run now opens with your top videos, creators or comments as a one-click copy panel, ranked by what actually travelled. Drop it into a brief, a trend report or a sentiment model without touching the raw dataset. - **An itemized bill on every run** โ€” the report closes with exactly what you were charged for, priced at your own plan's rate. The headline number and the invoice are the same number. - **One-click retry for empty pages** โ€” anything Douyin did not answer comes back with a reason, a concrete next step, and a copy-paste input that repeats just that run. - **Creator avatars render in the dataset** โ€” profile pictures now show as images in the Douyin dataset view instead of a bare URL, so a creator shortlist is scannable at a glance. - **Chinese text renders correctly in the report** โ€” captions, comments and creator names in the run report now display as written, on every browser. #### ๐ŸŽ Clearer free-tier terms, stated up front - **Your tier and its limits are printed at the top of every run** โ€” rows per run, pages per run, and what a paid plan changes. No surprises halfway through a job. - **Free runs return up to 25 rows** with the full field set and the same data quality. Paid plans return everything Douyin has. - **You are never charged for an empty page or an error** โ€” billing is per row delivered, and the run report says so with the numbers to check it. #### ๐Ÿ’Ž User Benefits - Read the outcome of a run in five seconds instead of scrolling a dataset to find out whether it worked. - Check what a job cost before it appears on your invoice, with per-row prices from your own plan. - Recover a partial run in one click rather than rebuilding the input by hand. #### ๐ŸŽฏ Use Cases - **KOL Agency** scanning a fresh Douyin creator shortlist by avatar and follower count before anyone opens the dataset. - **NLP Researcher** copying a run's whole comment thread as plain text straight into a sentiment pipeline. - **Market Intelligence Analyst** reconciling a month of scheduled Douyin runs against the itemized charges on each one. ### \[2026-07-14] #### ๐Ÿ”ฅ Sort a creator's catalog by popularity - ๐Ÿ”ฅ **NEW: Sort User Videos by popularity.** The `User Videos` operation now accepts a `sortType` input โ€” keep the default `Latest first` for chronological catalogs, or switch to `Most popular first` to pull a creator's all-time top videos ranked by engagement. Perfect for instant KOL "greatest hits" audits. - ๐Ÿ›ก๏ธ **Better User Videos coverage.** If a creator's video list comes back empty from the default data source, the actor now automatically retries through an alternate source before giving up โ€” fewer empty results on hard-to-reach accounts. ### \[2026-06-20] #### ๐Ÿงฏ Fewer confusing failures on busy days - ๐Ÿงฏ **Graceful gateway-error handling.** Temporary error pages served by Douyin are now retried and routed cleanly instead of surfacing as confusing parsing failures. ### \[2026-05-12] #### ๐ŸŽ‰ Douyin Scraper โ€” Launch! - **Seven Scrapers in One Actor** โ€” extract Douyin (TikTok China) video data, profiles, user video catalogs, comments, sub-comments (reply threads), and run keyword searches across videos and creators โ€” pick the operation, paste the input, one clean dataset per run. - **Video Detail Extraction** โ€” full Douyin video payload by ID (`aweme_id`): caption, play/like/share/comment/collect counts, playable video URLs, cover, dynamic cover, music metadata, creator info, duration, timestamps. - **User Profile Scraping** โ€” full Douyin creator profile by `secUid`: follower count, following count, total likes received, post count, bio, verification badge, IP location, full avatar set โ€” ideal for KOL discovery. - **User Video Catalog Mapping** โ€” paginated history of any creator's posts (~20 videos/page) with engagement metrics for KOL audit & content-strategy reverse engineering. - **Video Comment Mining** โ€” paginated top-level comments with author, IP location, like count, reply count, hot-comment flag โ€” feed your sentiment models with structured comment data. - **Video Sub-Comment / Reply Thread Extraction** โ€” paginated reply threads under any comment with `replyCount > 0`. **Unique feature** โ€” no other Douyin actor on the Apify store exposes nested replies. - **Search Videos by Keyword** โ€” surface trending Douyin videos in any niche (Chinese ยท English ยท mixed queries supported), ~12 results/page. - **Search Creators by Keyword** โ€” discover Chinese-market KOLs by keyword with handle, followers, verification, bio โ€” ~19 results/page. - **BigInt-Safe 19-Digit IDs** โ€” Douyin `aweme_id`, `uid`, and `cid` are preserved at full precision (most scrapers silently corrupt them and break cross-operation joins). - **HTTPS-Normalized Media URLs** โ€” every video URL, cover, avatar, and music track is delivered ready to embed. - **Cursor Pagination + Safety Cap** โ€” stream up to 50 pages per run with a single input parameter; auto-stop on last page. - **Curated camelCase Aliases + Raw Fields** โ€” clean `videoId` ยท `secUid` ยท `playCount` ยท `userName` ยท `caption` aliases for everyday users, plus every raw Douyin field spread alongside for power users. - **HTML Run Report** โ€” every run produces an HTML summary (success rate, errors, duration, inputs) saved to the key-value store. - **Predefined Dataset View** โ€” an Overview layout that opens the right table in the Apify Console with one click, whichever operation you ran. - **Auto-Retry on Transient Failures** โ€” a page that does not answer first time is retried automatically, with backoff, before it is ever reported as failed. You see the results, not the retries. #### ๐Ÿ’Ž User Benefits - **Save hours per KOL shortlist** โ€” search Douyin creators by keyword and rank by followers in 5 minutes instead of 5 hours of manual scrolling. - **No API key, no setup, no proxies** โ€” paste a video ID, secUid, or keyword and run. Production-ready from the first click. - **Pay-per-result pricing** โ€” only charged for successful extractions; never billed for empty pages or errors. - **Deeper sentiment data than any rival** โ€” top-level + nested reply threads give you the full conversation tree, not just the noisy surface layer. - **Bulletproof data shape** โ€” flat structure with both camelCase aliases and raw fields means every downstream tool (BigQuery, Notion, Airtable, Slack) just works. - **Cross-operation joins that actually work** โ€” bigint-safe IDs let you pivot from search โ†’ video detail โ†’ comments โ†’ sub-comments without losing a single character of precision. - **GDPR-friendly defaults** โ€” extracts only publicly shared data; no private user info, no email or phone scraping. #### ๐ŸŽฏ Use Cases - **KOL Agency** building a Douyin shortlist for a brand campaign โ€” runs Search Users + User Profile across 10 keywords in 30 minutes. - **Market Intelligence Analyst** at a global FMCG brand monitoring China short-video trends before launching a new SKU โ€” schedules daily Search Videos runs across product-category keywords. - **Brand Manager** at a luxury label tracking counterfeit & gray-market mentions on Douyin โ€” hourly Search Videos with brand keyword + Slack alerts on high-engagement matches. - **NLP Researcher** building a Chinese-language sentiment dataset โ€” pulls Video Comments + Sub-Comments across hundreds of viral videos in one weekend, getting both surface reactions and threaded debate. - **Influencer-Marketing Agency** doing due diligence on a creator before signing โ€” runs User Videos across 20 pages to audit posting cadence, engagement drift, and content quality. - **Content Strategist** at a media agency tracking viral video patterns weekly โ€” scheduled Search Videos run feeds a trend dashboard with view-velocity rankings. - **Music-Industry Analyst** tracking which sounds are trending on Douyin โ€” Video Detail rows expose `musicId`, `musicTitle`, `musicAuthor`, and `musicPlayUrl` for every scraped video.