The short play is free, who is consuming it?

Recently, with the help of ByteDance's traffic matrix and strong financial support, Hongguo Short Drama has risen rapidly and quickly stood out in the fiercely competitive online video industry through its free form. Free is also a kind of consumption, but it is free for the C-end and paid for by the B-end.

How popular are short dramas?

Let's first look at a set of data: According to iMedia Consulting data, the scale of China's online micro-short drama market will reach 37.39 billion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 267.65%. It is estimated that the scale of the micro-short drama market will exceed 50 billion yuan in 2024.

This is almost on par with the film industry, and is expected to reach 100 billion in three years.

On the 13th, the exquisite short drama "Return to the Yongle Encyclopedia" with the theme of ancient book restoration was launched. The short drama was selected as the fourth batch of recommended dramas in the "Travel with Micro-Short Dramas" creation plan.

The high-quality short drama "Jinyi Lane" which was launched not long ago was selected as one of the Beijing Radio, Television Network Audiovisual Development Fund's 2024 support projects.

Both short dramas are produced by Hongguo Short Drama. In 2023, Douyin Group launched the free drama product Hongguo Short Drama, which is committed to providing users with a large number of free high-quality short dramas.

Previously, Zhou Hongyi's first short drama was also launched simultaneously on the Hongguo Short Drama APP and the Douyin account of "Uncle Zhou Hongyi in Red", with 73,000 views within 1 hour.

The short play received 274,000 views in 3 hours and was viewed 95,000 times on the Hongguo Short Plays APP.

When users watch dramas for a long time, they will generally see an 8-second advertisement for every 3 episodes of the drama.

The profit model of Hongguo is similar to that of Fanqie Novels.

Tomato Novel is another fast-rising app under ByteDance. It was launched in November 2019 and had 192 million monthly active users by the end of 2023. It has become a giant in the free reading market. Its competitors include Baidu's Qimao Novel, Tencent's China Literature Group, etc.

Yuan Zichao, the copyright cooperation manager of Hongguo, is also the copyright cooperation manager of Fanqie Novel.

He mentioned in November 2024 that Hongguo currently releases more than 1,000 short dramas every month, and a total of more than 15,000 short dramas are online.

In comparison, iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video, and Mango TV all release around 100 new dramas each year.

Yuan Zichao mentioned that Hongguo can provide the industry with a content budget of more than 200 million yuan per month.

In June 2024, Hongguo disclosed its profit sharing amount for the first time, with the monthly profit sharing amount exceeding 100 million yuan.

In September, Hongguo’s monthly distribution amount exceeded 200 million yuan.

Strong incentives also brought about a surge in data.

According to data released by the third-party agency QuestMobile, in March 2024, Hongguo Short Drama ranked sixth in the online video industry with 54 million monthly active users, but its average daily usage time per person was about 1.38 hours, exceeding the four major long video platforms including iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video, and Mango TV.

In September this year, Hongguo Short Dramas soared again, with monthly active users reaching 120 million, a year-on-year increase of 1045.9%, ranking first in the industry.

Some media even revealed that the number of daily active users of Hongguo Short Drama has exceeded 50 million, and the goal is to break 100 million.

Why is it that only Hongguo's short drama has achieved the first place by a large margin in September this year?

Will free short plays really change the industry?

In this regard, Xin En Xiaoyi and Shu Le had a discussion, and I think:

Free is also a kind of consumption, but it is free for the C-end and paid for by the B-end.

This is inseparable from the support of the entire ByteDance software traffic matrix behind Hongguo Short Drama. After all, most of the current short drama APP companies are small and medium-sized companies.

"Hongguo Short Drama and ByteDance's Douyin, Tomato Novels and other businesses have formed ecological complementarity to a certain extent.

For example, most of the content on Hongguo Short Drama is authorized by Fanqie Novel. For another example, when users see the short drama slices authorized by Fanqie Novel on Douyin, they will be recommended to download the Hongguo Short Drama APP by clicking on it.

Not only that, backed by ByteDance, Hongguo also has the ability to make money.

Although Hongguo can obtain a lot of traffic with the help of Douyin and Fanqie Novels, the key to retaining users still lies in the content, namely:

Whether the content is high-quality and rich enough, and the ability to pay is the prerequisite to help it be realized quickly.

All of this is actually the internal cycle of the ByteDance system, and the free model has already been used on Tomato Novels, cutting off Tencent Literature’s 20-year strategic depth in online literature.

At this moment, it is just the same old trick, but with a thicker trump card.

After all, the emergence of Tomato Novel back then relied on the traffic brought by the similarity of the graphic and text content of Toutiao.

Now, the collaboration between Hongguo Short Drama and Douyin has once again attracted traffic from the audio-visual perspective, and has the larger IP library accumulated by Tomato Novels.

It's not just Youku, iQiyi, Tencent Video and Mango TV that need to worry, in fact the entire entertainment industry needs to be worried.

Free is still the most powerful weapon to break through the giants in the Internet era, especially in the entertainment industry. ByteDance's advance is to nibble away at others first and then swallow them up.