Revelation from the Spring Festival period of short short dramas: Can the two promote each other?

This article deeply analyzes the development trend of micro-short dramas in the "horizontal and vertical battle", explores the strategic adjustments of long video platforms and short video platforms in horizontal and vertical screen short dramas, and how this "horizontal and vertical mutual promotion" model brings new opportunities for content creation, commercial monetization and industrial chain development.

There is no "I was a Stepmother in the 1980s" this year.

At that time, the record of "Stepmother" was found. The soaring of nearly 5 million heat value in a single day and the recharge of over 20 million left a myth of wealth creation for the Spring Festival in 2024. It is said to be a myth not only because of the "explosion" of popularity, but also because of the "luck" that cannot be replicated.

However, the fact that there is no "stepmother" this year is not a matter of much disappointment to the market. Players who have shown their talents in the rapidly changing micro-short drama market in the past year have ushered in a show during the Spring Festival in 2025. What is worth paying attention to is not just how amazing the profits created by a micro-short drama, but how this market is co-shaped and how it leads to the birth of new businesses. The disappearance of "stepmothers" reflects a more competitive industry ecology.

Looking back at the discussions on the development trend of content consumption in recent years, the "long-short battle" has gone through 1.0 in 2022 when long video platforms and short video platforms fought fiercely, and then experienced 2.0 in 2024 when long series and short series faced each other head-on. Today, under the framework that micro-short dramas have become popular, the focus is on the "horizontal and vertical battle" of micro-short dramas.

The competition among platforms in 1.0 is a clash between entertainment works and UGC, which is essentially a competition for the user's entertainment window. This "infrastructure" type of collision is irreconcilable. Whether it is long or short series, horizontal or vertical format, they all belong to the competition of different content styles. For major platforms, this can become a "business" issue.

Mature platforms do not make choices, and they can have everything. Judging from the performance of short dramas during the Spring Festival, laying out two fulcrums on short dramas will be the landing point for a new round of beachheads for various platforms in 2025.

01 Beyond “No Hot Selling Products”

Perhaps it was because "I Was a Stepmother in the 1980s" created a lot of hype during the Spring Festival, so all parties were eager to try out the movie in this year's Spring Festival.

Judging from the platform's micro-short drama strategy, "new" and "free" are the key words for the short drama during the Spring Festival, and "high-quality" is the general direction of the competition.

Hongguo has launched more than 100 free short dramas, and has worked with more than 30 professional film and television companies to create Spring Festival dramas. It has also launched the variety show "Let's Go Short Dramas!" Another new player, Xiaohongshu, has also launched a hundred short dramas for free. After launching the short drama channel on January 22, it officially announced the launch of the Spring Festival short drama season.

iQiyi focuses on "micro dramas" (single episode duration 1-5 minutes, mainly vertical screen), and a total of 28 high-quality micro dramas were released from New Year's Eve to the seventh day of the first lunar month. Members can watch 10,000 dramas, and non-members are limited to one micro drama for free every day. Mango TV also presented a list of vertical screen dramas for the New Year, which will be updated for seven consecutive days. The first VR vertical screen micro drama "Safe Evacuation of the Cyber ​​Century" innovatively combines VP virtual technology to create a fantasy work of Chinese mythology and cyber science fiction.

If we look at it from the perspective of the layout of short dramas on both horizontal and vertical screens, it is worth paying attention to the long video platform Tencent Video and the short video platform Douyin.

Tencent Video is an all-rounder.

In terms of horizontal screen short dramas, Tencent Video released 8 new ones during the Spring Festival, covering themes such as traditional Chinese fantasy, Republican romance, and urban counterattack.

• "Wealth Is Too Much", a drama in which the unpopular heroine travels through a book to save the supporting male character, won the top spot on Yunhe's January short drama dominance list on the entire network, with a cumulative distribution of more than 8 million.
• "The Bride Stealer" tells the story of a young general and his childhood sweetheart who reunited after a breakup. It topped the Tik Tok entertainment charts on the day of its premiere, with cumulative revenue sharing exceeding 7 million.
• Wang Bingbing's first costume short drama "The Ancient Yue Is No Longer Seen Today" focuses on cultural and museum themes. It is a horizontal screen short drama with time travel and fantasy as the shell and family affection and growth as the core. It has attracted the attention and coverage of more than 50 authoritative media.

After years of hard work in the field of horizontal screen short dramas, Tencent Video has achieved significant long-board effects and has reaped rich rewards during the Spring Festival.

In terms of vertical screen short dramas, Tencent Video focuses on diversified themes to reach multiple types of people. During the Spring Festival, more than 350 vertical screen high-quality short dramas were launched, and the overall consumption scale increased by 100% compared with before the festival.

In the female-oriented track, the heroine Nirvana drama "The Wrongly Married Man" rushed to the top 4 of DataEye's short drama hot list, and the suspenseful emotional drama "Out of Sight" ranked top 4 on Dataeye's short drama hot list. In the male-oriented track, "Renting a Female Boss to Go Home for the New Year" hit the social issues during the Spring Festival, turning jokes into short dramas, and ranked TOP39 on the Douyin Entertainment List on the first day of broadcast. "Bringing Mother to Become a Phoenix" interprets a "cool drama" from the perspective of the elderly group, and a rich daughter counterattacks with her mother.

In addition, "Nine Layers Purple", which was popular on Tencent Video in 2024, also launched a derivative short drama "Zhao Shi Lu", which not only won the top 1 on Tencent Video's vertical screen short drama hot list and the top 1 on the short drama hot search list on the site, but also expanded its voice outward. On the first day of the broadcast, it received 11 hot searches on the entire network and squeezed into the TOP10 of multiple lists on Douyin and Weibo.

Douyin has also made considerable moves, preparing 30 high-quality short dramas for the Spring Festival, covering both horizontal and vertical screens.

Judging from the published film list, Douyin attaches great importance to the "representativeness" of the works in its layout of short dramas during the Spring Festival.

"Celebrity-starred" works include "Miss Pufferfish", starring Li Jiaqi and Han Tongsheng, with 150 million views; "Couple's Spring Festival", starring Ni Hongjie and Zhang Chenghe, with 450 million views.

"Long-running drama derivatives" include "In the Name of Love", an IP derivative of "In the Name of Family", with 370 million views; "The Rising Sun" is also a derivative series of Zhu Chaoyang, the main character in "The Bad Kids".

The representative work of "Official Support", "Little Nyonya at the End of the World", was selected by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television for the creation and dissemination of high-quality online audio-visual programs. It was filmed in Singapore and focused on the feelings of homeland of overseas Chinese. The number of views reached 140 million. The representative work of "AIGC", "When the Sun Falls", was produced by Douyin and Wukong AI. It was adapted from the novel of the same name that won the gold award for the best novella at the 7th Global Chinese Science Fiction Nebula Award.

As for vertical screen short dramas, "Unstoppable Marriage in the Year of the Snake", which features elements of the Year of the Snake, has received over 45 million views in 54 episodes, and "Ascending the Phoenix Platform", produced by Tinghua Island and starring top short drama actor Jiang Shiqi, has received over 58 million views in 155 episodes.

When all parties are preparing to make a big splash during the Spring Festival, the probability of a hit is actually reduced. Fierce competition is bound to lead to a distraction of attention, but apart from the fact that there is no absolute hit, there are relatively more works, the market is more prosperous, and attempts are more meaningful.

As the short drama market becomes increasingly large in the future, hits will be more likely to exist in the form of vertical categories. The characteristics of the short drama content ecosystem determine that hits in the segmented track are a more practical goal to pursue. Therefore, it is more noteworthy that the activity of micro short drama users has been proven during this Spring Festival; during this Spring Festival, short dramas with horizontal and vertical screens complement each other.

02 Focus on the "short" first, then the "vertical"

2020 is the first year of micro-short dramas. In August of that year, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television added a new "online micro-short drama" section to the filing system, making micro-short dramas the fourth officially recognized form of online film and television works after online TV series, online movies, and online cartoons. Since then, long video platforms have begun to consciously cultivate the mentality of users on the site to watch micro-short dramas.

Take Tencent Video's "Shifen Theater" as an example. Shifen Theater was born in 2021 and is the first micro-short drama brand in the industry. At the beginning of its establishment, it adhered to the concept of "good content is not divided into length", and it has long begun to try vertical screen micro-drama adaptation and interactive drama creation within the genre of short dramas.

But the main idea is to create short and concise content, so horizontal screen short dramas have always been the focus of Shifen Theater. The effect is also obvious. In 2024, the revenue share of "Zhi Pen" of Tencent Video Shifen Theater exceeded 27 million, far ahead of others.

Until the wild growth of mini-program short dramas broke into the public eye. At the beginning, mini-program short dramas followed the routine of skirting the edge and melodrama, directly hitting the user's emotional points. Therefore, even if the production is crude and the plot is brainless, it can still win the user's purchase by relying on exaggerated reversals and undelayed "coolness". The sudden rise of mini-program short dramas has made the content market re-examine that "short" can be made very rich.

At this point, we can be more certain about the impact of mini-program short dramas on the creation of various types of content. In 2024, "Mo Yu Yun Jian" emerged as a dark horse in the transformation of long dramas into short dramas. After the hit of "Nine Layers of Purple", short drama directors came to the table. Faster rhythms, stronger reversals, and more distinctive lens languages ​​have all begun to be reflected in long dramas.

This is the "mutual promotion of long and short" that has spread from a single video to the entire industry.

So what next?

Don’t forget that mini-program short dramas have also aroused the interest of long video platforms in vertical screen short dramas. The potential of vertical screen short dramas + online literature-style content output cannot be ignored. Therefore, an interesting point in this micro-short drama Spring Festival is that being “short” is not enough; it also needs to be “vertical” to be a complete layout.

Take iQiyi's layout trajectory as an example. iQiyi did not enter the micro-short drama market early, but from its strategy, they clearly realized that micro-short dramas need sufficiently refined operations to maximize their value. At the iQiyi World Conference in the fall of 2024, iQiyi announced the opening of "short theaters" and "micro theaters", making a clear distinction in terms of duration, scheduling and content type. The former is mainly horizontal screen, and the latter is mainly vertical screen.

It is even more so during the Spring Festival. Adding more entrances is a sign of sincerity, using new vertical screens is a basic operation, and using horizontal screens is a way to show strength. For example, Tencent Video directly added an entrance to "Free Short Dramas" in the second position of the bottom navigation bar on the APP homepage, guiding existing short drama users and potential groups on the platform to consume a large number of free short dramas, which is simple and direct.

From targeting short dramas to focusing on vertical screens, long video platforms are building a "new position".

Through vertical screen short dramas, long video platforms can attract another circle of users or seize another kind of "entertainment time" of users. Horizontal screen short dramas are actually standing at the starting point of high-quality production. They can be regarded as a type of content that follows the production logic of long dramas and changes the content creation logic. The presentation format of the same frame as the long drama does not create a new atmosphere through the change of the lens language.

Vertical screen short dramas are different. The vertical layout is more in line with the way people use their phones in daily life, which is convenient for one-handed operation and viewing at any time. This format is more suitable for fast-paced, fragmented viewing scenes. The condensation and release of emotions will have a doubly infectious effect in this format, which is why so many melodramatic online articles are suitable for adaptation into vertical screen short dramas.

The attention that was once diverted by short video platforms may be regained through vertical screen short dramas. This is a great temptation.

Even in a careful comparison, the effect of the additional layout of short video platforms on horizontal screen short dramas will not be better than the effect of the additional layout of long video platforms on vertical screen short dramas. Because the convenient vertical screen is a viewing state that is more easily chosen by users, it is more difficult to guide the habit cultivated by short video platforms on the user side to switch to horizontal screen viewing. The principle that it is difficult to go from luxury to frugality also applies to the conversion of horizontal and vertical screen content viewing, and adding a convenient option on the long video platform is equivalent to opening a new opportunity entrance.

The fundamental purpose of "horizontal and vertical mutual promotion" is to achieve comprehensive optimization of the content ecosystem and maximize the excavation of commercial value by covering more of the user's entertainment time. It is not only a complementarity in content form, but also a deep integration and innovation in platform strategy. In the context of the booming short drama market, the mutual benefit of "horizontal and vertical mutual promotion" will be inevitable.

03 Make the pool bigger and then revitalize it

Can the horizontal and vertical screens walk on two legs and run?

The horizontal and vertical screens are operated separately, but the pool that can be made large must have the energy of 1+1 greater than 2. Because when the pool is large, there will be liquidity.

First, from the most direct content perspective, there can be "experience flow". The experience of horizontal and vertical screens can be transferred to each other. The user insights accumulated in horizontal screen short dramas can also lead to the production of high-quality vertical screen short dramas, and there is also broad development space in the multi-dimensional use of platform IP.

The second is the "flow of gameplay" in monetization.

From the perspective of business model, there are three main models in the current short drama market. The first is the paid short drama model (IAP) represented by mini-program short dramas, the second is the free short drama model (IAA) represented by the Hongguo Short Drama App, and the third is the native model of directly broadcasting short dramas with copyrights on the platform through official accounts.

When long video platforms enter the market, "member monetization" can have more ways to play, and more rights and interests combinations can be innovated to fit the horizontal and vertical screen short dramas. Mature peripheral derivatives in the long video industry chain can also flow into the short drama field, and the short drama marketing itself can also feed back to the platform, allowing the platform's profit territory to be expanded.

Third, from the perspective of the industrial chain, "copyright flow" will bring new opportunities to large and small producers. When long video platforms are open to vertical screen short dramas, there will be one more revenue path for producers. Producers who cannot take the path of large-scale investment and high-risk paid short dramas can find a way to survive in this way. In addition, distributed broadcasting is also conducive to the further expansion of the short drama market.

Fourth, a phenomenon that has already begun to emerge is that the "talent flow" in the entertainment and film and television industry will also go a step further. On the one hand, the behind-the-scenes team of screenwriters and directors, on the other hand, the "actors" on the stage are gradually moving out of their fixed circles.

Many well-known celebrities have joined the filming of short short dramas during the Spring Festival. Once thought to be shot by internet celebrities and KOLs and at the bottom of the contempt chain, short short dramas have gradually broken away from the traditional stereotype as they have become more refined. In the context of the entertainment industry, which is full of top stars, there is no shortage of high-quality short short dramas, which is a good attempt.

For the platform, more star effects will be beneficial to the micro-short drama theater.

If the above flows can proceed in a healthy and orderly manner, it will be a dual combination of "long and short promote each other" and "horizontal and vertical promote each other". The common prosperity of horizontal and vertical screens on the same platform will be like a stone thrown into a pond, spreading out circles of ripples.

All collisions will bring new possibilities, and some actors have begun to break the boundaries of imagination.

Author｜Senyu