In the 50 billion short drama arena, the first person to pay will be the first to admit defeat

Watching short plays is like eating sunflower seeds. Eating sunflower seeds means eating one kernel at a time. Watching short plays means watching each one for free. You can always comfort yourself that 2 yuan can't be that expensive. In fact, quantitative change has already led to qualitative change.

The heroine was about to produce evidence to slap her ex-husband and Bai Yueguang in the face, but the video screen went black at just the right moment and an option to "Buy this episode for 2 yuan" popped up.

Xiao Guo wanted to search for online disk resources, but the copyright protection of short dramas is getting better and better. No matter what platform you watch it on, a payment lock is set here. If you want to have a "cool text SPA", you have to pay money, pay money, and pay money.

Xiao Guo readily recharged 10 yuan into her account. After all, it was enough to watch 5 episodes, and she could wait until her ex-husband and Bai Yueguang were embarrassed.

As expected, after the heroine threw a dozen pieces of evidence on the table, her ex-husband was dumbfounded, and Bai Yueguang fell to the ground instantly. Who knew that at this time, the heroine's father suddenly broke into the office, slapped his daughter hard, and the payment reminder popped up again.

Seeing that the sunk costs had been invested, Xiao Guo recharged another ten yuan based on the principle of "it would be a waste of money if you don't finish watching it", and once again fell into the cycle of "the excitement is followed by the torture", just like a fish wandering on the river bank, knowing that the fat meat hanging on the hook is a trap, but still can't help taking the bait, and then waiting for the fate of being slaughtered.

The fish that are lucky enough to jump back into the river will tell the entire school of fish that the fat meat is a trap and not to bite it, but don’t forget that fish only have a 7-second memory, so they will never be able to break the paid curse of short dramas.

The vulgar short dramas with keywords such as "CEO", "richest man", "rebirth" and "counterattack" are illogical and focus on emotional "coolness". There are three big explosion points in one minute, an extreme hook in each episode, and a big gap immediately after a small "coolness point". The payment point is often set here. It only costs two yuan to unlock an episode, but if you are addicted to "chasing dramas", the bill will "snowball" infinitely.

In order to create suspense and attract people to pay, short dramas can ignore the logic of the plot. The newly produced evidence is falsified, and the newly married couple is divorced. A revenge plot that can be told in 5 episodes is forcibly filled with 20 episodes. When you see the slices, meaningless close-ups and slow shots can take up more than 10 episodes. Even the water-injected pork in the vegetable market is inferior.

But who knows how it became a "sweet poison" that led Xiao Guo to pour money into it, just like facing a sweet-mouthed and beautiful female anchor, giving gifts one after another.

Moreover, the 2 yuan unlock fee was so tempting that she would often check her bills and find that she had spent thousands of yuan without realizing it. At this rate, she found that she had watched at least 500 episodes, but short dramas were often 100 episodes long, so she only watched five or six dramas in less than a week.

Xiao Guo's good friend defines this phenomenon as the "melon seed effect". Short dramas are instant recharge enjoyment type, and watching short dramas is like eating melon seeds. Eating melon seeds means eating one kernel per seed. Watching short dramas means watching a series of recharges, and you can always comfort yourself that 2 yuan can't be that expensive. In fact, quantitative changes have already produced qualitative changes.

The industry has now summed up a formula for shooting micro-short dramas, which usually involves setting up a plot twist or climax within 15-20 seconds, and leaving suspense in the last 10 seconds of each episode. This is the fastest way to attract the audience's attention.

Xiao Guo still cannot resist the temptation of short dramas. She can always find reasons to watch short dramas during her commute, before bed, or while slacking off. But she has learned to stop when she sees paid dramas, and only allows herself to watch five more episodes a day. Since she can't give up short dramas, she will let the gold coins decrease a little, so that the leeks can grow longer.

1. How much does it cost to watch a short play?

"My mother paid more than 20,000 yuan on the short drama platform. How can I get it back?" On Xiaohongshu, some netizens posted screenshots of their parents recharging on the micro-short drama platform on the social platform.

Many netizens replied in the comment area that their parents had encountered similar situations. "My parents usually don't understand how to use WeChat, but they actually found the entrance to recharge the short drama and can give rewards smoothly. People who usually have to bargain when buying vegetables actually recharged tens of thousands of yuan!"

Some netizens even shared their own experience: "I can't bear to drink milk tea now, but I found that the money I spent on the skit this month is enough to drink milk tea every day."

However, young netizens are popular with watching short dramas in a “garbage-picking” way, that is, watching an episode here, an episode there, and piecing together the finale, and finishing a short drama in this way. After all, an episode is one or two minutes long, and a drama is just over an hour long, which is more expensive than going to the cinema to watch a movie. #月薪10,000望看短剧# once topped the Weibo hot search list, which shows that people resonate with it.

But the middle-aged and elderly people who are retired and at home have money and free time, and often accidentally check the automatic renewal option because of their dizziness. They are of course the group that short dramas are more willing to harvest.

In fact, as early as January last year, the chaos of micro-short dramas inducing payment was included in the "Hotspots of Consumer Rights Protection Public Opinion in the Fourth Quarter of 2023" of the China Consumers Association, but now it seems that the trend of short dramas cutting leeks is still strong and has blown directly into 2025.

As middle-aged and elderly people are not familiar with using mobile phones, after being misled by advertisements such as “only 0.9 yuan to unlock one episode”, it is difficult for them to notice options such as “default to automatically unlock the next episode”, and they purchase all the short drama series without knowing it.

Want to get your money back? The world of short dramas is not as easy as the world of online games. You can't get a refund by saying that a minor has recharged. After all, big companies will never run away. However, short drama apps are always cunning. Adults who have recharged money can only face the embarrassing situation of complicated appeal procedures and the amount of money that can be recovered is better than nothing.

Some netizens said that filing complaints one by one would take up a lot of time and energy, and some businesses even "changed their identities" or directly removed videos, making it difficult to protect their rights.

Take the extremely popular online drama "After a Flash Marriage, Mr. Fu's Vest Can No Longer Be Hide" as an example. It has a total of 100 episodes, and the last 86 episodes are paid. Each 2-3 minute episode is sold at 2.5 yuan. It costs 215 yuan to finish watching the whole drama. The same price can almost buy a one-year iQiyi membership.

According to the popularity list of paid short dramas, 61 out of 73 episodes of the popular short drama "The Sword Immortal Returns, Riding a Donkey to School" in January 2025 required payment, and 51 out of 60 episodes of "The First-Class Phoenix Lady" required payment, and the payment rate was much higher than that of horizontal screen long dramas.

Of course, viewers can also choose to recharge their membership to unlock the series. The membership price for a single series is 120 yuan, and you can watch all the episodes. If you want to watch the next series, you will need to re-activate the membership for the next series.

The survey shows that micro-short dramas require small investments and have quick returns. Some micro-short dramas have one minute per episode and the starting shooting cost is only 5,000 yuan. However, the monthly recharge amount of the micro-short drama industry in 2023 increased from 40 million yuan in June to 60 million yuan in October.

According to the "White Paper on the Development of China's Micro-Short Drama Industry (2024)", the market size of micro-short dramas in my country will reach 50.44 billion yuan in 2024. In this era of wildly growing paid short dramas, keeping the "0氪 original intention" is more difficult than not participating in Pinduoduo's cut.

2. The big cake that is targeted by all parties

A short drama that costs 200,000 or 300,000 yuan to produce only costs 200 or 300 yuan to watch its entire episode. This sounds absurd. After all, the production cost of "Avatar" was as high as 237 million US dollars, but a movie ticket at that time cost less than 50 or 60 yuan. If we calculate it based on the input-output ratio, it is no wonder that short dramas have become the darling of capital pursuit.

But behind the amazing profit margins, the survival status of short drama companies is not as good as the outside world thinks, and many short drama companies are even quietly closing down. Last year, a short drama company called Yimeng in Hangzhou was reported to be disbanded, and all 27 short dramas that cost 30 million yuan to shoot were flops.

Is it survivor bias or everyone has their own destiny? The answer is that the cost of a skit is not just as simple as filming and production.

The bulk of the expenses for short dramas basically come from "investing in traffic", that is, placing information flow advertisements to attract users to watch, and the cost of investing in traffic is similar to the publicity cost of the short drama.

Niu Jing, founder of Beijing Jiatian Film and Television Culture Co., Ltd., once mentioned in an interview that the number of viewers who clicked to enter the film, the viewing time, which episodes have better data or deviations, etc., are all data that need to be tested in depth, and then decide whether to make additional purchases or stop losses. The life cycle of each short drama is different therefore.

Therefore, the high cost of short dramas is based on the explicit production costs on the one hand, and on the other hand, the investment and streaming expenses have already been "packaged" into the selling price in advance.

The producers of the short dramas have no publishing channels, so they can only edit the short drama materials and put the videos on popular apps to attract users to jump to the mini program and pay to watch.

When evaluating the price of advertising, we need to look at the calculated ROI (return on investment). The industry ROI is generally around 1.1-1.2, and on average you can earn 1,200 yuan for every 1,000 yuan you spend. This means that the drama is worth continuing to invest in, and investing more money will hopefully make it a hit.

For a short drama with a recharge of over 100 million yuan, about 80 to 90 million yuan was spent on streaming. The remaining money needs to be divided among the broadcaster, streaming party, producer, and screenwriter according to the contract and rules. Therefore, although the production company seems to spend less, it actually does not earn much.

In addition, the short drama itself requires the audience to concentrate highly on the plot and not be distracted by the outside world. Otherwise, it is easy for them to wake up from the payment routine in an instant and think "Why pay for such a plot?" Therefore, profit-making methods such as interstitial advertising cannot be realized.

If advertisements cannot be distributed, the only option is to rely on buyout and membership systems, which is the above-mentioned payment to unlock the full series and purchase membership to watch the short series without advertisements. A short series with a recharge amount of over 100 million is already a phenomenal hit, but most short series are not so lucky.

The short drama market waits for no one. Everyone relies on quantity, and most of them fail. It's like waiting for a star to fall from the sky. If it comes, it will be a hit, but if it doesn't, you will lose money. So once a hit short drama comes out in the market, it will be copied in batches very quickly.

There are even producers in the industry who openly complained: "We received a request for filming from the platform before, and three versions of the script have been released online. In this version, only the names of the actors have changed, the location and costumes have not changed. We are just gambling on traffic." In fact, all the money earned is distributed to the traffic platform.

3. Various short plays downstream

In addition to the people who watch the short dramas and pay, and the people who make the short dramas and wait for Schrödinger's hit, there are also many downstream projects derived from the short dramas.

For example, the short drama promotions that are often seen in information flow ads, which start with a scene of slapping and riding in a luxury car, and then stop abruptly, and a button to jump to the mini program pops up.

Similar to the previous novel promotion videos, the repetitive and mechanical cake-making or small game recordings were turned into short drama slices, and were also accompanied by an emotionless AI female voice, becoming a good business for many people to make money.

Many short drama platforms encourage users to do promotion. Promoters only need to use their mobile phones to edit the short dramas into short videos and post them on Douyin and Kuaishou to attract traffic. They can get a commission on the amount paid by users. Generally, the commission is more than 50%. If a user recharges 100 yuan, you can get at least 50 yuan. Moreover, the labor cost is much cheaper than the traffic investment, which is a win-win deal.

However, due to copyright issues, these accounts are often blocked. Another risk is that after working hard for a long time, you only get a few dozen yuan, because short videos often contain exclusive promotional passwords for promoters. If you do not search by the password, but pay by searching for the correct title, then the share will not fall to the promoter, but will be wasted on others.

Therefore, the promotion of short dramas now mainly relies on developing downlines to make money, and the profit is earned from the profit sharing of the downlines, as well as the profit sharing of the "downlines of the downlines". The hereditary system in the short drama industry is by no means as rigid as the Enfeoffment Order in feudal society, nor is it afraid of one dominant company. Therefore, "my vassal's vassal is still my vassal" often happens.

In addition, businesses such as selling editing packages and buying fans have also emerged. Even if you are a complete novice who has never been exposed to short drama editing, you can have a batch of sound effect sticker editing resources in one day, and buy 1,000 fans on the video account, so that you can start videos openly.

The next thing is selling pirated resources. Currently, some second-hand trading platforms are not so strict about handling the copyright of short dramas. Simply searching for the word "short drama" will pop up a whole screen of "1000+ bought" store links, from the initial 1 yuan to the current 0.1 cent, and you can even bargain with two people.

The same group of people who sold film and television resources before are back again, and have discovered another business - paying 9.9 to join a group and watch short dramas. The audience thought they were getting a bargain, but in fact, by transferring to the Quark network disk through the group link, the group owner earned a 5 yuan reward for attracting new members and a transfer reward of about 0.2. Those who pay are always "lambs to be slaughtered."

Fortunately, not everyone in the world of short dramas is a "Hannibal". They will give the leeks a little space to grow before eating them all up. After all, online literature, legendary games, and online shopping small commodities are still waiting for the next round of hunting and harvesting. In this "9.9 Universe" ecosystem, if you recharge and take it seriously, you will lose.

Author丨An Xiao Editor丨Nut