In just half a year, 600 million people have been "hooked" on AI short dramas.

A 3-person core team, with a registered capital of 100,000 RMB, half a year of independent development, 12 consecutive seasons of output, a conservatively estimated profit of 6 million RMB, and an optimistic estimate of 20 million RMB... The "wish-fulfilling life" of the AI short drama *The Legend of Ten Thousand Demons* is just like the industry it belongs to, growing increasingly fierce and unstoppable.

At the beginning of this year, the Hongguo APP only set up an independent entry for AI dramas. Now, among the top 99 works on its hit list, AI short dramas have taken 77 spots, and the must-watch list, hot search list, and favorite list have all been completely dominated by AI works, leaving live-action dramas far behind and thoroughly outcompeted.

Blockbusters have become even more "explosive". Last year, a work with over 100 million views could squeeze into the annual TOP 20, but now hit dramas that exceed 100 million popularity on the first day come one after another, driving the overall market popularity to keep rising.

The overseas expansion is even more aggressive. While domestic players are still competing to "gain hundreds of thousands of RMB with an investment of only a few thousand", stories of "exchanging 3,000 RMB for 500,000 US dollars" are already circulating in the overseas operation circle. Statistics show that AI short dramas produced in China have occupied more than 70% of the overseas market.

Lao Xie, an experienced AI short drama producer, shared his updates with "Biaowai Biaoli" four months after their last conversation. His monthly profit has stayed stable at around 200,000 RMB, and he has also developed a new digital human IP, which has already connected with many advertising clients. In the market, the 60-second advertising quotation for top-tier IP has reached 260,000 RMB, equivalent to that of an internet celebrity with millions of followers.

Over the past period, Lao Xie has witnessed the continuous shift of popular traffic themes, and experienced the impact of rapid iteration of video generation large models. Batches of volume-focused players have fallen due to income not covering costs, but he has never left the market.

"If AI short dramas at the beginning of this year were just a casual side project, today they have truly become a 'mass consumption' that cannot be ignored." He judges that AI content will seize fragmented entertainment time in a more aggressive manner, and even transform many operation methods of the traditional internet industry.

At the moment when the "second outbreak" is coming, while poorly run low-quality workshops are collapsing and being eliminated, a larger industry outlet may have just opened up.

After all, the bigger the storm, the more valuable the fish.

A small step for photorealistic human dramas, a big leap for the AI short drama industry

Earlier this year, Yao Shi stepped into the AI short drama industry, and soon encountered a "black swan" event.

At that time, many beginners made a lot of money by using AI voiceover to explain comic images. He also followed this path to enter the market, but unexpectedly caught up with the platform adjusting its policy: the revenue sharing coefficient for comic commentary dramas was directly cut to 1, while that for photorealistic human dramas was raised to 60.

"AI photorealistic human dramas follow a completely different production logic." Yao Shi explained, for comic commentary dramas, you only need a narrator to say "the protagonist is furious, the two have a big quarrel", but for photorealistic human dramas, you need the characters to "act" with corresponding expressions, eye movements, and body movements matching the lines, which requires mastery of dialogue generation and character driving technology.

This stumped Yao Shi who had zero relevant foundation, but he didn't hesitate for long and decided to go all in on transformation: "Comic commentary dramas are too low-quality, they will be regulated sooner or later. Besides, short video platforms know best what users like to watch, so following the platform's direction is definitely the right choice."

Time quickly proved that this judgment was correct.

The handsome male protagonist with sharp eyebrows and bright eyes steps closer step by step; the equally beautiful female protagonist frowns slightly, with five points of surprise, three points of nervousness, and two points of grievance in her eyes, and the ambiguous atmosphere between the two is pushed to the extreme... Tuzi, the viewer outside the screen, also blushes and her heart races along with the plot.

Source: Public materials

Tuzi has watched scene after scene of such high-quality content that is rarely seen even in live-action dramas, in AI photorealistic human dramas.

"Live-action dramas are likely to encounter 'ugly works backed by capital', or vases with no acting skills." She said frankly, domestic entertainment's adaptations of IPs she likes are always unsatisfying. On the contrary, AI short dramas often bring surprises, "The male and female leads are good-looking with stable appearance, their interactions are also delicate, they can restore the pictures and the original work well, and you will not feel disconnected from the plot."

When she first found people around her watching AI short dramas, she scoffed at it, thinking "they are all fake characters, I can't stand watching them"; later it gradually evolved into "I can get into any AI short drama", she stays up late to watch them every day, exchanges recommended works with friends, and is completely addicted.

Data shows that the popularity of AI photorealistic human dramas has skyrocketed 5 times in just four months, with its proportion rising from 10%+ in January to a peak of 60% — this growth rate is almost synchronized with the growth of the number of AI short drama audiences in China.

"Taking Seedance2.0 and Keling3.0 as the watershed, the texture of AI characters has begun to be infinitely close to that of live-action short dramas, which greatly reduces the audience's sense of rejection and effectively improves user retention." Creator A Yu analyzed, especially young women who are keen on themes such as urban romance, sweet love, and ancient costume idol dramas, can "seamlessly switch" from live-action dramas to AI short dramas.

At the same time, dominant themes of "large production" such as fantasy, post-apocalyptic, and science fiction have absorbed a large number of male users, breaking the limitation of single audience group that AI short dramas had in the early stage. Since July, platform traffic has tilted from AI photorealistic human dramas to 3D animations. "3D animations do not have the uncanny valley effect, and are more suitable for male-oriented themes such as cultivation immortality, further expanding the audience group." A Yu said.

But he emphasized that the key to the outbreak of AI short dramas is that they perfectly adapt to the public's fragmented and fast-paced content consumption habits.

Lao Xie clearly felt that in the last three or four months, the requirements for audio-visual language and plot arrangement of AI short dramas have improved visibly to the naked eye: a new interesting point must be presented every 30 seconds or every four shots; works that were rated as S-level in the past can only be classified as A-level now.

"The pace of AI short dramas is surpassing that of live-action short dramas, and moving closer to the pace of short videos." Lao Xie admitted that AI short dramas were originally "spiritual Red Bull" for sinking users such as truck drivers, and now the enhanced version is provided to office workers, whose power is self-evident.

A large number of audiences pouring into AI short dramas have also made many traditional production companies and platforms trapped in the "film and television winter" choose to "join them if they can't beat them". From Douyin, Kuaishou, to iQiyi, Tencent Video, Youku, and even Taobao and Pinduoduo, all regard AI short dramas as a key tool to attract traffic and improve user retention.

This drives the increase of the proportion of mid-tier works in the industry, attracts more audiences to enter the market, and accelerates the arrival of the "era of national AI short dramas". At the same time, it also turns the gears of fate for practitioners in this field.

The creation threshold has risen, and the "bonus pool" for blockbusters has also become larger

In the era of AI short dramas, students majoring in liberal arts have ushered in their "spring".

0-2 seconds: the cat holds a gun and aims, with cold eyes, slightly tensed jaw, and fur moving gently with breathing; 2-4 seconds: the cat's eyes tremble slightly, pupils shrink, eyebrows frown lightly... The recently viral "shooting" series of videos have prompts that read like writing a novel.

Behind this is another round of iteration of video generation large models. Lao Xie recalled: "In the past, if you simply wrote one or two sentences describing the required picture, AI would automatically complete the details; but the latest generation of large models has extremely strong instruction following ability. The more specific you write about how the character moves, what happens in a few seconds, how the emotion and transition connect, the more accurately AI can restore the picture."

Sometimes, the prompt for a 15-second shot accidentally becomes as long as a paper. "If you want to survive, you have to learn Chinese well first" he joked, otherwise repeated manual debugging and adjustment will make the computing power cost that "has quintupled in 5 months" even more unbearable.

Yao Shi's team not only produces AI short dramas, but also distributes them, which means that playback revenue will also affect their profits.

"In the past, the revenue for every million RMB of effective views was 15-30 RMB, but now it has dropped to 3-10 RMB, a direct drop of more than half." According to Yao Shi, they settle accounts with short drama platforms on a monthly basis, but the amount is a "black box" — the platform controls the total revenue and distribution ratio, and they only receive the final number, neither knowing the size of the total pool nor the calculation logic.

Judging from the shrinking playback revenue, the total amount of platform revenue sharing does not seem to grow with the expansion of user scale, but narrows as competition intensifies. "At present, more than 1,600 new AI short dramas are launched in China every day, the launch speed has increased by 30% compared with the first half of the year, and leading platforms such as Jiuzhou and Dianzhong can produce hundreds of works a day."

Yao Shi found that platforms are changing from the original "well diggers" to "water takers", which makes the survival of creators increasingly difficult.

"In the past, platforms used huge traffic and revenue sharing subsidies to cultivate users' habit of watching AI short dramas, expand user duration, increase advertising revenue, and consolidate the ecological closed loop." He said, now that the traffic pool has been built up, the "climate" of the platforms has changed.

Major platforms have summed up a set of "blockbuster formulas", guiding creators to apply the template of wish-fulfilling stories to produce standardized products that are controllable, mass-producible, and eligible for revenue sharing, turning creators into "content fillers". This not only intensifies the homogenization of works, but also erodes the subjectivity of creators.

Even some platforms have launched "exclusive contracts": only works with high quality that adapt the platform's own online novel IP can get 10% revenue sharing for the author and obtain the qualification for signing. Otherwise, the work cannot be launched on mainstream short drama platforms, and the maximum revenue from sharing will be reduced to zero.

"Now AI short dramas are no longer a track where everyone can get a share of the profit." Yao Shi suggests that ordinary people should not enter the industry if they do not have the trial and error cost of producing 10 dramas.

However, the other side of the coin is that for creators who have cultural literacy, technical ability, understand the rules and the market, now is a good time to enter the market.

An interesting phenomenon is: today's hit AI short dramas often do not come from large teams, but from small workshops.

In the past, AI short drama creators were "gambling everything for a big success with a 10% survival rate". With the surge in the audience base, and the exit of creators who only want to make a quick buck, the market's demand for high-quality content is actually greater, and the probability of high-quality works being seen has also increased.

The development of the AI short drama industry is gradually shifting from "platform-driven" to "user-driven".

"At least the popularity of high-quality works is increasing, and the theoretical ceiling of revenue that blockbusters can reach is higher than before." Yao Shi said, and it is not only the revenue