ByteDance's overseas short drama platform is operated by the TikTok team, and it sees the fastest growth in the United States and Brazil.

JIEMIAN News learned from people familiar with the matter that ByteDance's overseas short drama platform PineDrama is not operated by the Hongguo team, but managed by an independent team under the TikTok business, and short drama producers can log in directly with their TikTok accounts.

While the user scale and usage duration of Hongguo Short Drama are surging, PineDrama has also set off a download boom overseas. According to insiders, PineDrama has maintained rapid download growth since its launch in December, with particularly prominent growth in the markets of the United States, Brazil and Southeast Asia.

JIEMIAN News checked data from Qimai and found that PineDrama currently ranks among the top 10 in the iPhone free app charts in the United States, Brazil and Thailand. In the US market, the download volume of PineDrama has grown rapidly since May this year, and its ranking on the iPhone free app list has basically remained steadily in the top 10 in the past two months.

At present, there are also short drama platforms such as ReelShort and DramaBox active in the overseas short drama market, all of which are operated by Chinese companies. Among them, ReelShort and DramaBox were launched earlier than ByteDance's PineDrama and adopted the paid model. After PineDrama was launched last December, it adopted the same free model as Hongguo Short Drama.

Wang Mian, the head of an AI manhua drama production company, told JIEMIAN News that PineDrama's growth soon surpassed platforms like ReelShort and DramaBox after its launch, which is inseparable from the traffic and ecological support of TikTok.

In his view, PineDrama has invested a large number of advertisements on TikTok to divert traffic, while the operators behind ReelShort and DramaBox, which are Maple Interactive (in which Chinese Online holds shares) and Dianzhong, do not have the support of large traffic platforms, and can only buy traffic from third-party platforms, so their traffic diversion strength is much weaker.

The free model is also regarded as an important reason for PineDrama's rapid growth. Wang Mian said that like Chinese users, overseas users also prefer the free model. "The operation logic at home and abroad is the same: first acquire users and increase daily active users, then realize monetization through advertising. The profit sharing from advertising is better than paid models, because the user scale will be larger."

It is understood that the vast majority of short drama producers on the PineDrama platform are from China. Many producers have experience in operating Hongguo Short Drama, and some producers have experience in operating Douyin and TikTok, so they are very familiar with the platform and save the cost of getting to know the new platform in the early stage. According to people familiar with the matter, the platform operation team is also promoting the settlement of local producers around the world.

In the view of many short drama producers, in the gameplay of AI manhua dramas, the core competitiveness of ByteDance's platforms not only comes from traffic, but more importantly, it has built a highly concentrated advantage on the script supply side.

Another short drama producer Li Gang told JIEMIAN News that among the AI manhua dramas produced by his team, IPs from Tomato Novels account for 70% to 80%. "Not only us, most of the teams in China that make AI manhua dramas basically get their scripts in this way."

"The platform provides a variety of IP cooperation models, and producers can choose according to their own needs. Under two of the models, producers can obtain free IP authorization from the platform's copyright library, and the corresponding works will be exclusively distributed on the platform. The other model is that producers create original scripts without using the platform's IP, and the copyright belongs to the producers, who can distribute the works on all platforms." Li Gang said, good screenwriters and IPs are inherently hard to find, and for purely original scripts, producers are very likely to invest costs but fail to produce hit works. His team is also negotiating IP authorization with Chinese Online and Yuewen, but the latter do not have such a mature cooperation process as ByteDance's platforms, and they need to negotiate separately for each work on how to share profits and whose account is used for distribution, which is "relatively inefficient".

According to JIEMIAN News, in ByteDance's ecosystem, producers take the majority of the revenue, and producers with different capabilities have different permissions to modify works. New producers generally only have the permission to modify high-potential works. Such works do not have enough popularity for either the author or the work itself, so producers need to rely on their own production and traffic investment capabilities to make the novel IP popular through short dramas. Only when producers produce hit works can they get the permission to modify high-quality IPs.

When the traffic advantage is combined with the screening mechanism of IP supply and production capacity, what ByteDance has built is not just a content distribution channel, but an ecosystem that can continuously attract producers, screen high-quality production capacity and promote large-scale content production. For other platforms, even if they can provide similar traffic, it is difficult to replicate this mechanism in a short period of time.

In terms of content supply, the increasingly fierce competition on the Hongguo platform this year has led a large number of producers to turn to overseas markets to find new growth opportunities.

Meanwhile, according to people familiar with the matter speaking to JIEMIAN News, the content supply of PineDrama is introduced through communication and negotiation by the company's overseas short drama business team, which also actively identifies and negotiates original scripts in overseas markets, which also solves its content source problem.

Li Gang revealed that at present, domestic short drama producers are more willing to target the overseas market, because the competition in the domestic market is already extremely fierce, and a large number of producers can hardly make profits.

The cost structure of his team operating AI manhua dramas on the domestic Hongguo Short Drama platform is that traffic investment accounts for 20% to 30%, and computing power accounts for 60% to 70% of the production cost; while on the overseas TikTok and PineDrama platforms, producers can get high play volumes without traffic investment, and the revenue per 10,000 plays on the platform is also higher than that in the domestic market.

He did the math for JIEMIAN News: at present, for an AI manhua drama with 200 million to 300 million plays in China, the producer's revenue sharing is about 200,000 yuan, which is already at the very top level of such play volume in China. But in the overseas market, a drama with a medium-low play volume can generate a revenue of 200,000 US dollars, and a drama with good play performance can even generate up to millions of US dollars in revenue.

"At present, the vast majority of people making AI manhua dramas overseas are Chinese." In Li Gang's view, ByteDance's short drama platforms will maintain rapid growth overseas.

(At the request of the interviewees, Wang Mian and Li Gang are pseudonyms.)

This article is from the WeChat official account "JIEMIAN News", written by Xiao Fang, edited by Liu Fangyuan, and published with authorization by 36Kr.