From "real people" to "anime characters", AI anime dramas are rising rapidly with a "sense of exhilaration and low cost".
Have you ever watched AI manhua dramas on Douyin or Red Fruit Short Drama?
Recently, AI manhua dramas have become a popular viewing choice for users.
In the second week of July 2026, a new record emerged on the overall hit chart of Red Fruit Short Drama.
Among the top 5 spots on the overall chart, 4 were occupied by AI manhua dramas. The Legend of Ten Thousand Demons Season 8 took the top spot with 89.19 million popularity; Everyone Has Reborn, Who Still Pretends to Be a Rich Second Generation? Season 2 ranked second with 67.11 million; Rural Daddy: The Strong Man's Parenting Diary came third with 64.11 million; Breaking News: The Reborn Big Shot Has Exposed Their True Identity placed fourth with 64.05 million. There was only one live-action short drama left, Wildfire Spreads, which barely held onto the fifth position with 63.36 million popularity.
(Image source: Red Fruit Free Short Drama)
If we expand the scope to the top 10, there are only 3 live-action short dramas. The other two are Brave Stepmother, Specializes in Taming Rebels, which ranks sixth with 63.17 million popularity, and Addicted to Newlywed Life with 57.91 million popularity. The remaining 7 works are all AI manhua dramas.
This is not a coincidence on a single day. Looking back, on April 5, the AI-simulated live-action drama Bodhi's Advent: Realistic AI Version achieved a popularity of 89.23 million, surpassing the 78 million of the top live-action short drama on the Red Fruit platform for the first time. On May 20, manhua dramas occupied 4 spots in the top 10 of Red Fruit's effective full-platform view counts, and 9 spots in the top 20.
Data from QuestMobile shows that in February 2026, Red Fruit Short Drama had 304 million monthly active users. During the same period, Red Fruit Free Manhua Drama, which had only been launched for 4 months, had 24.04 million monthly active users, with a per capita daily usage time reaching 90.7 minutes.
A product with 300 million users is having its content structure reshaped by a new product that has been online for less than a year.
What AI manhua dramas are driving is not just view counts, but the underlying logic of users' entire content viewing habits.
The Three-Year Miracle of Live-Action Short Dramas
However, Red Fruit Short Drama has only been online for 3 years. When it was launched in April 2023, it had only 320,000 monthly active users.
Almost no one noticed this product from ByteDance. By March 2024, monthly active users climbed to 54 million; exceeded 120 million in September of the same year; reached 210 million in June 2025; in January 2026, daily active users exceeded 100 million, with monthly active users approaching 300 million; and hit 304 million in February.
In the January 2026 Mobile Internet Industry Report, QuestMobile stated that Red Fruit dominates the short drama track with a 42% market share, becoming ByteDance's fifth "100-million-user" app.
Red Fruit Short Drama adopts a revenue-sharing operation model of "free viewing + advertising". Users watch dramas for free, the platform monetizes through advertisements, and revenue is distributed to content creators based on traffic. Data shows that revenue sharing exceeded 100 million yuan in June 2024, 200 million in September, and 300 million in November. In March and April 2025, the monthly revenue sharing exceeded 500 million yuan for two consecutive months. The monthly ARPU from pure advertisements for DAU reached 29 yuan, higher than iQiyi's membership ARPU, proving that this is a profitable business.
Apart from revenue, Red Fruit also boasts competitive user retention. In February 2026, Red Fruit's per capita daily usage time reached 125 minutes, while Hema Theater, the second-ranked platform in China, only had 41.7 minutes.
The threefold gap shows that Red Fruit is not only competing for users, but also for retention.
According to different statistical standards, female users account for 61% to 68% of Red Fruit Short Drama's user base, with the 31-40 age group being the main force, and urban romance and ancient-style sweet pet stories being the top genres. Data from DataEye shows that the TGI value of female users is 102, slightly higher than 96 for male users.
This is a precisely defined user base of "mothers in the family + working women", lacking a core group of male users.
When the market generally believed that live-action short dramas had great potential, a large number of investors poured real money into the industry only to find that the AI era had arrived, and AI manhua dramas had become the new optimal solution. The original user base began to shift and change under the impact of AI.
At this point, Red Fruit's choice was to build another core user base, using AI manhua dramas to cover a completely different group of people.
AI Manhua Dramas: From Exiled to the Border to Dominating the Charts
2025 was known in the industry as the "first year of AI manhua dramas". Data from iiMedia Research shows that the market size of AI manhua dramas reached 16.8 billion yuan that year, and is expected to increase to 24.36 billion yuan in 2026. 36Kr's forecast is more aggressive, predicting that China's AI manhua drama market will reach 30 billion yuan in 2026, while the forecast from Ocean Engine is more conservative, putting the overall market size of manhua dramas at 22 billion yuan in 2026, contributing 50% of the growth in the short drama industry.
The growth curve of the user base is equally impressive. In 2025, there were about 120 million manhua drama users in China, and the number is expected to increase to 280 million in 2026, covering the 18-40 age group.
Red Fruit Free Manhua Drama was launched exactly at this juncture. It went online in November 2025, with 8.54 million monthly active users in its first month, ranking among the top 3 short drama apps, and its monthly active users skyrocketed to 24.04 million in February 2026.
Data from DataEye shows that in June 2026, the incremental view count of native AI short dramas on ByteDance's platforms reached 179.8 billion, a 30% increase from May. Among the top 50 works in terms of incremental views, AI manhua dramas occupied 29 spots (58%), while there was only 1 such work in May. 7 out of the top 10 works were manhua dramas, all of which exceeded 500 million in incremental views.
The top spot was taken by a 3D manhua drama called Exiled to the Border, The Convict Wife Clears the Wasteland and Raises a War God. It recorded 2.127 billion incremental views in June alone, leading the rest by a large margin. As of early July, the 6 works in this series had a total view count of nearly 4 billion. On Red Fruit's overall hit chart in July, the seventh season of this manhua drama ranked seventh with 60.06 million popularity.
Other hit works are also emerging rapidly. The total view count of the The Legend of Ten Thousand Demons series has exceeded 6.08 billion, with 89.19 million popularity in July, firmly occupying the top spot on Red Fruit's manhua drama chart.
The growth in production capacity is even more astonishing. In June 2026, 23,746 new native AI short dramas were launched on ByteDance's platforms, a 62% increase month-on-month, with an average of 792 new works released every day. Apart from Douyin, Kuaishou's data is equally impressive. As of April 2026, Kuaishou Short Drama's daily average exposure exceeded 129 million, and the advertising expenditure on manhua dramas surged nearly 20 times in the past six months. Kuaishou's marketing expenditure on AI manhua dramas in Q1 increased by more than 100 times year-on-year, with a single-day peak exceeding 20 million yuan.
Nowadays, AI manhua dramas have become the second choice besides watching short videos. An office worker named Li said: "A few months ago, when I saw someone watching AI manhua dramas, I might ask, 'Hey, how is it? Is it good?' Now, when I see someone watching AI manhua dramas, I will ask them to recommend good ones to me. I also want to enjoy this great content."
User Reconstruction: A Precise "Gender Complementation" Strategy
AI manhua dramas and live-action short dramas target two different groups of people.
The user profile of Red Fruit Short Drama (live-action content) shows that female users account for about 61% to 68%, with the 31-40 age group being the main force, who prefer urban romance and ancient-style sweet pet stories. The user profile of Red Fruit Free Manhua Drama is almost a mirror image, with male users accounting for 62%, young users aged 18-34 making up over 60%, and their favorite genres being fantasy cultivation, urban brainstorming, and war god counterattack. Data from DataEye shows that 61% of live-action short drama users are female, while 62% of AI manhua drama users are male.
Therefore, it is not that men do not like watching short dramas, but that the previous genres were not content that men enjoyed. When AI manhua dramas can generate the grand, hard-to-produce scenes that were previously difficult to create, the male market has also been developed.
Thus, the two markets cover two completely different groups of people, with a complementary rather than substitutive relationship.
The content supply of AI manhua dramas precisely matches this user structure. Fantasy counterattack is the top genre, with works like The Legend of Ten Thousand Demons, Magical Treasure Pot, and Awakening the Master: I Finally Got Rich After Inheriting Taoist Skills ranking among the top. Farming and time-travel is another major genre, represented by Exiled to the Border, The Convict Wife Clears the Wasteland and Raises a War God and Rebirth Against the Current. Silly comedic animations and meme-style manhua dramas account for 44% of the total supply, using light-hearted humorous content to attract younger user groups.
Cost, Revenue, and Production Capacity Contraction
The explosive growth of AI manhua dramas comes from the cliff-like drop in costs.
According to insiders, the production cost of a single live-action short drama usually ranges from 500,000 to 800,000 yuan. However, the cost of an AI manhua drama can be reduced to 50,000 to 240,000 yuan, a 60% to 90% decrease. More precise data shows that the production cost per minute has dropped from 2,000 to 5,000 yuan in mid-2025 to below 1,000 yuan, and even 400 yuan can produce qualified content.
Top production studios have a monthly production capacity of over 100 works, and a 3-person team can complete a single work in 5 days.
Hangzhou Youhe Culture is a typical case. This company started producing self-made AI manhua dramas in July 2025. Its first trial work, which was 60 minutes long, took a 5-person team one month to complete, with a cost of 30,000 to 50,000 yuan, and only earned 3,000 yuan through organic traffic. But half a year later, the company's structure underwent a systematic reorganization. Half of the original 30-person screenwriting team for live-action dramas shifted to creating AI manhua dramas. The company has a total of about 600 employees, among whom the core team focused on the manhua drama production workflow is around 300 people. In January 2026, the company's overall monthly revenue was about 100 million yuan, with AI manhua dramas contributing 70 million yuan, accounting for a soaring 80% of the total.
Changes are happening too fast. Ding Li, the founder of Miguo AI, gave a more intuitive description: "Last year, we could still charge 3,000 to 5,000 yuan for one minute of AI manhua drama. But after this year's Spring Festival, many prices have directly dropped to below 1,000 yuan. My labor cost in Shanghai is 10,000 to 20,000 yuan per person, but some companies pay their employees 1,600 yuan a month without paying social insurance and housing fund. I simply cannot compete with them no matter how hard I try."
He even quoted a comment from a French partner: "They bluntly said that what we are producing is cultural garbage."
The flip side of the plummeting costs is the uneven quality. In 2025, about 60,000 manhua dramas were launched across the industry, but only 96 of them exceeded 100 million views, with a hit rate of 0.16%. By the end of February 2026, this figure further dropped to 0.117%. Red Fruit launched a special campaign to rectify low-quality manhua dramas in April 2026, removing 3,522 works within a week, and the total number of disposed works exceeded 10,000 by the end of April.
In Q2 2026, about 6,000 new AI short dramas were added in a single quarter, a significant contraction compared to Q1. The platforms are restricting traffic for low-quality AI manhua dramas, the barriers for filing and review are rising, and the revenue per 10,000 views is continuously decreasing, with all three factors tightening simultaneously. The total number of AI short dramas launched throughout the year is expected to be controlled at 160,000 to 180,000, and the production of low-cost assembly-line manhua dramas will decrease by more than 60% from Q3 to Q4.
The difficulties in commercialization are also emerging. The ROI of pure paid manhua dramas has dropped to 1.1, and only the top 5 manufacturers can maintain an ROI above 1.2. The daily average advertising expenditure on AI manhua dramas for Ocean Engine exceeds 1 million yuan, with a peak of over 4 million yuan a day. A production studio invested 60,000 yuan in traffic acquisition, but only got 1,000 yuan in paid conversions in return.
Kuaishou invested 2 billion yuan in resources to boost its short drama business in 2026, including 800 million yuan for revenue-sharing exploration, 200 million yuan in a special cash fund to incubate high-quality works, and a 1 billion yuan exclusive traffic pool. This fund is not only support, but also a signal to guide the industry to shift from quantity expansion to high-quality development.
In response, ByteDance is also accelerating its overseas layout. In November 2025, Epoint World and Alibaba Cloud jointly announced that they had reached a framework cooperation agreement for AI manhua dramas going global. Recently, ByteDance launched the independent app PineDrama, and the official short drama platform on TikTok has also opened up for cooperation.
Early partners