DramaBox Scraper — Short-Drama Catalog, Episodes, Cast & View Counts

Scrape the DramaBox vertical short-drama catalog without the app: series metadata, genres & trope tags, full episode lists, cast, view counts and follow counts — structured, ready for analysis. API-first (reads the site's own SSR JSON, no browser), so runs are fast, cheap, and reliable. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML, or pull straight through the Apify API into your app, agent, notebook, or spreadsheet.

This is the missing DramaBox API / DramaBox data source: the $11.3B short-drama category has had essentially zero structured-data coverage. If you're a studio, licensor, casting researcher, or analyst asking "what's charting and what should we greenlight next?" — this is your dataset.

No per-datapoint games, never charged for failures. Flat $2 per 1,000 series ($0.002 each), billed only per series actually stored. Invalid or failed pages are never charged.

What it scrapes

Field	Description
bookId / bookName	Series ID and title (plus English/slug form)
introduction	Full synopsis
genres / tags / labels	Genre IDs + names and trope tags (Revenge, CEO, Billionaire, Werewolf, …)
viewCount / followCount	Platform-reported engagement (approximate display values, parsed to integers)
chapterCount + chapters[]	Episode count and the full episode list — number, title, duration, free/locked
cast[]	Performer list (id, name, avatar, # of titles) — a cast index that exists nowhere else publicly
releaseDate / lastUpdateTime	First-live date and latest shelf update
cover / url	Cover image and canonical series URL

Modes

• Full catalog (crawl) — seeds from the DramaBox homepage and expands through each series' related-titles graph. Set Max results to cap size and cost.
• By genre — the same crawl, filtered to a genre or trope tag (e.g. Billionaire, Revenge, Werewolf). Case-insensitive.
• Specific drama URLs — scrape exactly the series URLs you provide.

Input example

{
    "mode": "genre",
    "genre": "Billionaire",
    "maxItems": 200,
    "includeChapters": true
}

Output example

{
    "source": "dramabox",
    "bookId": "42000004343",
    "bookName": "If I Never Loved You",
    "url": "https://www.dramabox.com/drama/42000004343/If-I-Never-Loved-You",
    "language": "ENGLISH",
    "genres": [{ "id": 161, "name": "Romance" }],
    "tags": ["Second Chance", "Billionaire"],
    "viewCount": 57338269,
    "followCount": 2295193,
    "chapterCount": 50,
    "releaseDate": "2026-01-20 16:00:00",
    "cast": [{ "performerId": "12070", "performerName": "Dorothy Mannine", "videoCount": 3 }],
    "chapters": [{ "id": "700278553", "episode": 1, "name": "第一集", "durationMs": 179954, "unlocked": true }],
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-12T20:02:17.911Z"
}

Export the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the Apify Console, or fetch it via the Apify API / SDK.

Who uses this

• Vertical-drama studios & producers — track what genres, tropes, and titles are charting to inform what to greenlight.
• Licensors & distributors — catalog intelligence across the fast-growing short-drama market.
• Casting & talent researchers — the cast list is a performer index for verticals that no public database covers.
• Market & trend analysts — engagement signals (views, follows) per series, genre, and release date.

How it works

DramaBox is a Next.js site that ships full structured data in the page's __NEXT_DATA__ payload. The Actor reads that JSON directly with a browser-grade HTTP fingerprint (via Crawlee) — no headless browser to render or break, which is why runs are fast and cheap. The crawler respects robots.txt (it does not touch disallowed paths such as search) and scrapes only public series metadata — no video assets, no user data.

Use it from n8n, Zapier, Make, MCP, and LangChain

Every Apify Actor is exposed via API and through Apify's integrations:

• n8n / Zapier / Make — run on a schedule and pipe series data into sheets, dashboards, or alerts.
• MCP / LangChain — give an AI agent live short-drama catalog data as a tool.
• Apify API & SDK — call it from your backend, then export CSV/JSON.

FAQ

Is there a DramaBox API? Not a public one. This Actor is the practical, available-today way to get structured DramaBox data.

How much does it cost? $0.002 per stored series — $2 per 1,000. You're never charged for failed or invalid pages. The free Apify plan's $5 monthly credit covers ~2,500 series.

Are the view/follow counts exact? They're the platform's own reported numbers (originally display values like "57.3M"), parsed to integers. Treat them as approximate, platform-reported figures.

Is scraping this legal? The Actor extracts publicly available catalog metadata and respects robots.txt. As always, consult your own counsel for your specific use case.