"Ne Zha 2" Wins at the Box Office, and Hongguo Short Drama Wins Time.

Written by Lan Jie

Edited by Qiao Qian

On February 17, the box office of "Ne Zha 2" has exceeded 12 billion yuan, surpassing the box office performance of "The Lion King" and becoming the first Asian film to enter the top ten of the global box office list.

In contrast, the short dramas that have been hotly discussed for a whole year have ended their Spring Festival season with the discussion of the lack of blockbusters. Even though Hongguo Short Drama recently announced its battle report - the total viewership during the Spring Festival season reached 19.3 billion, it did not cause too many waves.

The relevant person in charge of Tinghua Island, which has hit short dramas such as "I'm a Stepmother in the 1980s" and "My Sudden Marriage Partner is from a Wealthy Family", told 36Kr that this year's Spring Festival season is indeed different from expectations.

The just-passed Spring Festival can be said to be the first Spring Festival season for the short drama industry. Everyone is not yet clear which theme or which platform a hit will appear on, but they are all in a state of readiness.

For Tinghua Island, during last Spring Festival, they did not even have the concept of a schedule. "I'm a Stepmother in the 1980s", which had a cumulative recharge flow of over 80 million yuan, was only "coincidentally released in the later stage of the Spring Festival".

In contrast, in 2024, Tinghua Island began to prepare short dramas to be released during the Spring Festival in November, with a higher budget. They also seriously studied the "Vertical Screen Aesthetics" and launched a total of 7 works, covering themes such as sweet love and rebirth.

For the platforms, according to "New Voice Pro", Hongguo probably started to finalize cooperation with first-tier production companies one after another from last September. So when other platforms came to talk about cooperation in November, the company's production capacity had already been booked. Xiaohongshu also officially announced the launch of the short drama channel on January 23.

The result of everyone's joint efforts is that more than 400 short dramas have crowded into the more than ten-day holiday during the Spring Festival. And this data is calculated through the "Watch Short Dramas During the New Year" special area launched by various platforms. In fact, the actual number will only be more, not less.

But in contrast, it is difficult to have a work like "I'm a Stepmother in the 1980s" again.

The get-rich-quick myth of the short drama industry once made the short drama producers very distressed. They repeatedly emphasized to the media that it is a flow of over 100 million yuan, not an earning of over 100 million yuan. But when the get-rich-quick myth really disappears, the short drama producers are obviously not used to this silence either.

"Fortunately, There Were No New Releases During the Spring Festival Season"

Spring Festival is an excellent publicity and distribution opportunity for mass entertainment such as movies. This is a successful experience that has been repeatedly verified since the New Year's films appeared in mainland China in the 1990s - just like the current 10-billion-yuan box office of "Ne Zha 2", which is equivalent to about a quarter of the total box office of the film industry last year.

But short dramas are not yet a kind of mass entertainment. It is the fruit that grows from people's fragmented time and attention, and the intense social behavior during the Spring Festival has taken away too much of people's attention.

Douzi has been a loyal fan of short dramas in the past year. She almost watches them every night before going to bed. Sometimes she watches for one or two hours and falls asleep when she is sleepy. Sometimes because "(the plot rhythm of the short dramas) is particularly strong, she will finish watching it." "One is about two hours long, and it's not impossible to be four hours."

But even Douzi like this hardly watched short dramas during the Spring Festival. During the New Year, she had many activities - including thorough cleaning, washing vegetables and cooking, visiting relatives and friends, and playing cards, etc. "The atmosphere of family reunion is not suitable for watching short dramas". Not to mention the "Spring Festival season" of movies, represented by "Ne Zha 2", which is the hottest movie in the past three years and has also taken away a lot of users' viewing quotas.

At the same time, the competition in the short drama industry is also becoming fierce.

"Intense competition" has become the key word of the short drama industry during the Spring Festival. The relevant person in charge of Tinghua Island told 36Kr, "From the first day to the fifth day of the Lunar New Year, there are dozens of new short dramas released every day, and each major platform has its own drama list." "Many people said that fortunately there were no new releases during the Spring Festival season." - Because it is too intense. And unlike 2023, which focused on quantity rather than quality, the quality level of short dramas in the 2025 Spring Festival season has obviously improved a lot.

While the industry is enthusiastically preparing for the Spring Festival season, there are also many doubts.

Are short dramas suitable for the Spring Festival? How to compare the blockbusters under the free model and the paid model? Under the revenue-sharing model, can short drama producers get as much money as in the recharge model?

The reason why these questions arise is that this year's Spring Festival happens to coincide with the transition period of the short drama industry. The supervision is continuously strengthening, and Hongguo Short Drama is taking the lead in promoting the free transformation of the industry's business model. The old methodology is failing, and the new methodology is still being explored.

An obvious change is that short dramas in the free model are gradually becoming the mainstream of the industry. Free short dramas also need investment and promotion, but compared with paid short dramas, the dependence on investment is not so high.

In the stage when paid short dramas were the mainstream business model of the industry, many short drama manufacturers took the approach of winning by quantity.

A simple explanation is to use ten low-cost short dramas to bet on a blockbuster with a flow of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of yuan. There is a high probability that nine out of ten short dramas will fail, but as long as one can succeed, it can make money. After making money, 80%-90% of the revenue of this blockbuster short drama is used to invest in more low-cost short dramas. At this time, what is more tested is the ability of the investor.

In the free model, short drama producers and distributors have the platform as a support, and no longer need to push the investment and promotion materials to every user by themselves. The logic of publicity and distribution is closer to that of long dramas - for example, many short drama manufacturers who have embarked on the path of high-quality production rely on word-of-mouth and topics to break through the circle, rather than investment and promotion.

The relevant person in charge of Tinghua Island said that for "What a Good Girl", which is regarded as a hit in this year's short drama Spring Festival season by the industry, "the investment and promotion are actually quite standard".

In addition, the situations of short drama producers are not the same, and the publicity and distribution expenses vary greatly, ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of yuan. The proportion in the total cost is not fixed, but it will never reach the proportion of 80%-90% of paid short dramas.

More reliance on content also means that the opinions and tastes of the audience are more important. The experience of creating blockbusters is difficult to replicate, and the content that the audience likes is changing rapidly. This is the source of the sense of crisis felt by Tinghua Island, which has produced many blockbusters.

At the beginning of the short drama becoming a trend, the themes that could gain huge traffic were similar. For male-oriented ones, it was the son-in-law and the war god. For female-oriented ones, it was the domineering CEO and rebirth. But these once-blockbuster themes are difficult to create miracles again under the questioning of homogeneity and the strengthening of supervision. Nowadays, the short drama industry has also shown an obvious trend of fragmentation, with short dramas on themes such as spy wars, the main theme, and even feminism emerging.

Even though the path to creating blockbusters is not yet clear, there are still many middle-aged and elderly people in the sinking market contributing to the flow of paid short dramas. But it is certain that under the promotion of Hongguo Short Drama, the market share of free-model short dramas has been evenly matched with that of recharge short dramas, and it will become the new trend of the industry in 2025.

The Spring Festival Season Dominated by the Free Model

During the Spring Festival, although Douzi didn't watch many short dramas herself, she caught a glimpse of her parents watching short dramas during their time together. After chatting with them, she also found that they were very familiar with the existence of Hongguo Short Drama.

At the beginning of 2024, the industry was still reluctant to give up the paid short drama model. Whether to do free or paid was almost a topic that had to be discussed in all short drama-related forums and activities. But by the beginning of 2025, the question of whether to do the free model has become an outdated topic. The question is how to do it and with whom to do it.

At this time, Hongguo Short Drama, which has a huge traffic advantage and online literature resources, has been regarded as an essential platform for the short drama industry. And the efforts of Hongguo Short Drama itself have given confidence to its upstream and downstream.

The relevant person in charge of Tinghua Island told 36Kr that in the process of docking with Hongguo Short Drama, they can feel that the other party is very efficient in handling problems. "During the Spring Festival, when we communicate with the platform about the cooperative topics, they reply quickly and confirm to you within ten minutes that it's OK and can be done."

During the festival, Hongguo Short Drama also used its traffic advantage for a large-scale publicity and distribution. In addition to placing a large number of pop-up windows and splash screen advertisements in ByteDance apps, it also reached publicity and distribution cooperation with stars such as Shu Chang and Liu Xiaoqing, as well as short drama brands such as Tinghua Island and Haoyou Benneng.

Spring Festival means more user attention, longer user usage time, and an excellent opportunity to attract new users for various apps. Before this, the Hongguo Short Drama team has achieved the goal of 50 million DAU (Daily Active Users) and has set a new goal of 100 million daily active users.

Judging from the Spring Festival season battle report released by Hongguo Short Drama this time, the total viewership of the platform during the festival reached 19.3 billion times. If calculated by the daily viewership (the Spring Festival holiday is calculated as 10 days), the average daily viewership reached 1.93 billion times, far exceeding the traffic in ordinary months.

This is also a number that is difficult to compare. Vertically, there was no clear free short drama Spring Festival season and related data in 2024. Horizontally, other platforms have not disclosed related data.

But it is certain that Hongguo Short Drama and its free model have been recognized and supported by the industry - in the free model, the producers can get almost the same amount of money as in the paid model.

The relevant person in charge of Tinghua Island said that although the flow of "I'm a Stepmother in the 1980s" is astonishing, as the producer, they only got a share of more than 5 million yuan in the end. In contrast, according to industry insiders' speculation, although the popularity of "I'm a Good Girl" is not as high as that of "I'm a Stepmother in the 1980s", the profits that the producer gets may not be lower than that under the investment and recharge model.

The revenue-sharing system of Hongguo Short Drama is relatively transparent, including the regular advertising revenue-sharing model and the "Fruit Burning Plan" revenue-sharing model for high-quality short dramas. In general, it takes the user's viewing duration and advertising viewing volume as the standards. In addition to providing production fund support and guaranteed revenue-sharing for high-quality short dramas, the latter will also give traffic support after going online.

On January 17, Hongguo Short Drama announced the script revenue-sharing situation in December last year. The total script revenue-sharing amount in a single month exceeded 32 million yuan, and the revenue-sharing amount of some top short drama scripts can exceed one million yuan per unit.

Even earlier, in June 2024, Hongguo disclosed for the first time that the revenue-sharing amount exceeded 100 million yuan. In September, it exceeded 200 million yuan, and in November, it reached more than 300 million yuan.

In addition to Hongguo Short Drama, there is an unexpected new player in this year's Spring Festival season - Xiaohongshu. Before the official announcement on January 23, Xiaohongshu has already become one of the important publicity and distribution platforms for short dramas.

Xiaohongshu set the short drama channel as the secondary entrance under "Discover", and currently it is also following the free model. According to the short drama vertical media New Wrist, the link for paid short dramas on the platform is also being built.

From the platform side, this move is just one of the many means for Xiaohongshu to attract new users to the app during the Spring Festival. From the short drama side, the short dramas with high popularity in the app are mainly female-oriented themes, which are in line with the user profile characteristics of Xiaohongshu. A rather interesting phenomenon is that the short dramas launched on Xiaohongshu are all equipped with English subtitles. This is related to the large number of "TikTok Refugees" who flocked to the platform during the TikTok ban turmoil some time ago, and further strengthens the international tone of Xiaohongshu.

But in general, this Internet app, which almost entered the short drama field at the last minute, is not yet a "catfish" that stirs up the track. Many short drama brands just casually settled in, and there are no hit short dramas on the platform.