Skits are booming, but why is no one around us watching them?

Now that short dramas are so popular, who is actually paying to watch them? The author analyzes the current situation of the short drama market. Short dramas already have a relatively fixed audience group, and everyone can be attracted by them. Let's take a look at the author's analysis.

2023 will definitely be a significant year in the history of short dramas, and the myth of making wealth is becoming more and more intense in this industry.

Regardless of whether people have been involved in related industries before, they are all eager to get involved in the short drama business. There are a lot of operations on social media collecting scripts, seeking to form teams, and making money together.

At the end of August, the mini-program short drama "Wushuang" received over 55 million yuan in recharges within 24 hours of its launch, and exceeded 100 million yuan eight days later. This move completely ignited the hearts of short drama practitioners, and the dazzling battle reports everywhere repeatedly verified the extraordinary money-making ability of short dramas.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

The sign that an industry is on the cusp of popularity is that, on the surface, the concept is hot and there is a lot of room for imagination, but in fact, the related industrial chain is complete and capital, hot money and talent are continuously flowing in.

According to this standard, short dramas have suddenly become the number one hot spot in the content industry in 2023. According to data released by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, more than 480 short dramas were launched on various online platforms in my country in the first half of 2023, exceeding the number for the whole year of 2022, equivalent to an average of 2.7 dramas launched per day.

Industry insiders also told Hedgehog Community: "For actors, it is not difficult to shoot a short play a day. A certain actress shot 48 short plays in two months, an average of 6 per week, almost one per day."

Evan, the producer of a leading short drama company, believes that if the world is a makeshift team, the short drama industry is the most extreme of the makeshift teams.

For many people, they can’t find anyone watching short dramas around them. On the one hand, the short drama industry is booming, and production and sales are booming, but on the other hand, almost no one around them is a short drama user, which is quite a disconnect. This easily raises questions:

Who is actually paying to watch skits ?

1. White-collar workers in first-tier cities secretly watch short dramas

At the beginning of 2023, Douyin's public data showed that the platform already had more than 100 million daily deduplicated users for many short dramas. On Xiaohongshu, there are already 320,000 notes about "short dramas". In 2022, the daily active users of Kuaishou short dramas exceeded 260 million, of which more than half of the audience had the habit of chasing dramas. By the end of 2022, the total number of views of Kuaishou's Xingmang short dramas exceeded 50 billion.

Liuyi is a copywriter for an Internet company in Beijing. She usually uses Bilibili, Douyin and Xiaohongshu as her most frequently used apps. She had never used Kuaishou before, but recently, she installed it because she was attracted by the short drama.

She described to Hedgehog Commune how she was attracted to the short drama: "When browsing Bilibili, it is easy to be attracted by secondary creation videos. When Xuan Niu is released, pure love comes on stage. Who can escape it?" (Xuan Niu is a single by singer Ge Dongqi, and it often appears as BGM in love movie clips.)

Liuyi’s preferred type of short drama is Danmei. She said that since there are relatively few dramas of this type, it is easy to be attracted to it as long as the appearance is acceptable.

Recalling the first short play he got into: "It was a story about an actress who dressed up as a bride and married into an enemy's family, and then she had to maneuver between two sons to get revenge. Looking back now, it wasn't that good or exciting, and the plot logic wasn't smooth, and the CP line wasn't obvious. It all depended on the audience's imagination, looking for sugar in shit."

But she still finished watching it in one go, because it was too short, with a main suspenseful plot, and a fast pace, and she finished it before she knew it. "And the comment section is very funny, with netizens eating sugar online, interpreting the plot, and recommending other dramas. The interaction is quite interesting. It can be regarded as a gathering place for niche enthusiasts." She added.

Screenshot of the short play "The Storm in the City Locks Huaizhou" by Kuaishou丨Source: Interviewee

In addition, some bizarre themes can also arouse her curiosity and desire to watch. Liuyi once saw a scene clip about "ghost marriage" on Douyin, which was full of suspense. Since she couldn't jump to it, she went to Kuaishou to search for it, but only a few episodes were updated at that time. After watching it, she forgot to follow it and now she can't even remember the name.

Fang Te, a product manager at a large Internet company in Beijing, had a similar experience. He once saw a mini-program short drama on Kuaishou. The whole drama was about 50 episodes, and after 20 episodes, he had to jump to the mini-program to pay.

Fangte recalled: "The short film started with a mystery. The hero lost his mother at a young age. The Taoist fortune teller said that only if his father left home could the hero grow up healthily. But the hero needed to worship the old locust tree outside the courtyard as his godfather."

During lunch time on weekdays, Fangte usually watches short plays while eating. Such a curious setting aroused his curiosity, but he also couldn't remember the name of the play, and could only vaguely restore the plot. He vaguely remembered one or two scenes - the strange story of the old locust tree being deceived by the female ghost and struck by lightning, and the male protagonist being with the female ghost. He said frankly:

"The best actor in this play is Old Sophora japonica."

When Fang Te listed the titles of his favorite dramas recently, the first one that came to his mind was the Japanese drama "Restarting Life". "Restarting Life" has a score of 9.4 on Douban. This drama is constructed by warm daily life and trivial conversations, burying the highlights in the details, and telling the emotions of the protagonists with delicate and humorous strokes, thus poking emotional resonance.

He explained: " This is the real psychological state of workers . At work, the brain is working at high speed, and the rest time is very fragmented. At this time, I want to watch some content that does not require the brain but is very refreshing."

Liuyi also said: "The completed short drama can be watched in one go on a weekday evening. The consumption cost is very low, unlike online novels that often have hundreds or thousands of chapters. The cost of trial and error is also very low. In less than a minute, you can know whether the drama is good or not. If you don't want to watch it, you can just swipe away and give up at any time."

Therefore, the audience of short dramas is not only in the sinking market. Users' demand for brainless and refreshing dramas has always been there, but this time it has been seen by more people (non-practitioners).

Many media have reported that this wave of short dramas is supported by middle-aged men in low-tier cities, but Evan believes that this data is outdated. In the recharge heat list they monitor, more than half of the top 20 dramas are female short dramas. Today (November 28), the short drama with the highest heat value is "After Divorce, I Became the Granddaughter of the World's Richest Man".

He said: "Short dramas are the same as short videos. The core logic is that content finds people. In fact, the lower the user base, the harder it is to find and attract them. As the supervision of short dramas is tightened, production companies are more cautious when accepting scripts. Scripts that simply rely on skirting the rules and fighting to attract attention are rejected."

2. Everyone can be manipulated by skits

Many industry insiders pointed out that short dramas are not as profitable as rumored by the outside world. The ratio of loss to profit is roughly between 7:2:1, but the cost of shooting short dramas is getting higher and higher.

In 2022, the production cost of a short drama was still in the hundreds of yuan per minute. By the second half of 2023, the cost of a short drama was as high as 10,000-20,000 yuan per minute. Of course, the rising costs are not all used for production. The investment and promotion costs of a short drama can reach 2-4 million yuan.

Despite this, even if only 10% of the short dramas can become hits, it is enough for the short drama company to cover the annual investment. Such a business model is like buying scratch tickets. Only by scratching them continuously can there be hope of a "hit".

Image source: Xiaohongshu account @Beautiful

Although success is destined by fate, there are still traces to follow.

According to Hedgehog Community, the appearance of the actors is the key factor in attracting users to continue watching. Celebrities themselves are a traffic entrance, but there are no celebrities in short dramas. For users, the most eye-catching thing is the faces of the male and female protagonists.

Rex, the founder of the short play production company Dodo Pictures, once told a joke that was widely circulated in the short play industry during a podcast recording.

Generally speaking, there are not many people in a short drama company, less than 100 people, and the workload is heavy. Colleagues are busy with their own things all day long. There is only one thing that can instantly bring all members of the company together - the casting interview for the male lead, which is called casting in the industry. No matter which job type in the film and television industry, everyone is interested in casting.

Zhang Xiaotu is a casting director for a short play company. When she heard this joke, she smiled knowingly and said, "During the casting, everyone in the company will come to the meeting room. I have never felt that there are so many people in our company, more than for a meeting."

She told me that you must have seen similar scenes, just like the scene where the emperor chooses his concubine in the TV series "The Legend of Zhen Huan".

When the production team of a short play is released, candidates will submit their resumes first. The casting director will conduct a preliminary screening based on their photos and personal information. Finally, 20-30 candidates will be selected for interviews. At this time, the casting officially begins. After entering, the candidates will introduce themselves using PPT, then turn 45 degrees and present themselves to the director in different ways, static and dynamic.

After the short drama industry became popular, Zhang Xiaotu's workload also increased exponentially. Starting from the second half of the year, a project received thousands of resumes. In order to select actors, he often worked overtime all night. But in the eyes of other colleagues, even overtime is a "sweet burden."

Zhang Xiaotu said that the burden on her shoulders is very heavy. If the actors can't even conquer the casting directors, how can the audience fall in love with them?

She revealed that the backstage data monitoring of the short drama is very complete, and the flow of people every minute can be clearly seen. If the data drops sharply when the male and female protagonists appear on the stage, it means that the casting has failed.

"In fact, there are many factors that determine appearance, such as makeup, lighting and shooting pictures. But if the data is not good, we will replace people. This industry is so cruel and real." She said helplessly.

In addition to appearance, the key factor that determines the life or death of a short drama is still the plot.

Zhang Xiaotu said: "In the female-oriented short drama track, sweet pets are always the mainstream. No one will always like a domineering CEO, but everyone will have a stage where they like a domineering CEO. Maybe it's when they are tired of life and want to dream. Even if it's an old trick, as long as the lines are explosive, the characters are likable, and the filming is innovative, it can still make girls roll around in the bed with a quilt and kick their legs."

Many practitioners told Hedgehog Commune that, like online novels, there is a huge gap between male-oriented and female-oriented short dramas, and they will never be able to understand each other because they have different objects of appeal.

An Lei lives in Shanghai and works as a clerk in a company. She started watching short dramas intensively in June this year. She has watched nearly 20 short dramas without missing a single episode. She paid to watch six of them, most of which were mini-program short dramas. The unpaid short dramas are mainly on the Kuaishou platform, where you can basically watch the entire series for free.

She firmly stated that she would never pay for content that disrespects women, such as mindlessly abusing the heroine, drawing the heroine's blood, forcibly possessing the heroine after adoption, and requiring the heroine to be a mistress.

In the male channel, short dramas about God of War and Dragon King's Son-in-law dominated the charts. Short drama user Locke said: "The two most popular content in the male channel are counterattack and pretending to be a pig to eat the tiger. Almost all stories can be divided into these two types."

Locke is a programmer at a Beijing company. He believes that no one wants to explore grand topics or watch trivial daily life in short plays. Instead, no one wants to see short plays that are out of touch with reality and counterintuitive. In short, the farther away from real life, the better.

The emotional needs that people place on literary works are nothing more than reflected in the four dimensions of catharsis, projection, resonance and identification. Short plays can achieve the extreme in the first two dimensions, which firmly grasps human nature.

In the process of talking with short drama users, Hedgehog Commune found that there is a certain attribution error in the current interpretation of short drama payment. That is, when something is successful, analysts always overestimate its value.

For example, many people attribute the success of the short drama to plot twists, character design, and payment at the right time, but there is another point that is often overlooked - the sunk cost of users. Many users said: "Since you spend money, you must see the result. Although it often ends in disappointment, you will never spend half of your money and get stuck in the middle. That would be too uncomfortable."

In summary, short drama users often stay for the appearance and pay for the plot, but the real reason that motivates them to keep paying and watching is the investment of sunk costs, which also makes most short drama users have inertia when making decisions.

Perhaps, as Evan said, the goal of short plays that want to make quick money and catch the trend is never to be "high-quality". Previously, he had also produced a short play that received a high score of 8.0 on the broadcast platform, but only a hundred people rated it.

After the show was finished, Evan resigned and the company was dissolved. From then on, he firmly believed that a model that was critically acclaimed but not commercially successful was doomed to fail in the long run.

3. Ending

On the evening of November 29, Pinduoduo became the largest Chinese stock in the U.S. by market capitalization. Many people attributed Pinduoduo's success to attracting a large number of consumers "outside the Fifth Ring Road" and called it "the victory of the sinking market."

In fact, low prices are a broader market, and this market should be regarded as the mainstream market. The same is true for short plays, which have long had a relatively fixed audience group and formed relatively stable cultural preferences.

Hedgehog Commune once discussed the topic of skits with couriers and food delivery guys. Although most of them have seen it, when it comes to jumping to the mini-program, they usually exit the APP in a panic for fear that their phones will be controlled by a "virus."

In addition, it is difficult for them to distinguish which are short plays, platform short plays or mini program short plays, horizontal screen or vertical screen, video slices or self-made short plays. For them, these are not important, as long as the length of one minute or so is collectively called a "short play".

While waiting to receive the package, the courier Zhong Cheng can watch several "short plays". The storm of short plays in the outside world has nothing to do with him. He does not care about the excitement and glory of short plays. However, when asked what short plays he watched, he hesitated and did not want to answer: "Don't ask, it's embarrassing."

(At the request of the interviewees, all names in this article are pseudonyms)

Author: Yi Tong, Editor: Director

WeChat public account: Hedgehog Commune (ID: ciweigongshe)