How much is the "Unsolved Case" purchased by Youku worth?

I've been binging "Cold Case" these past two days.

One episode a day, staying up late for several nights in a row. My eyes are dark with fatigue, and I rely on coffee to get through the day. When I reached the second case, I stopped to think about one thing: where did I even hear about this drama?

Not from friends' recommendations, not from trending searches. I stumbled on it myself on the Youku homepage.

This is a bit unusual. I checked Douban and saw a 7.5 rating. On July 24, all the summer-season dramas released their scores collectively, while other shows hovered between 6 and 7. This one stood far ahead, taking the top spot by a large margin.

Not a single person around me has talked to me about this drama that tops the summer ratings by a huge gap.

So what exactly is this "top spot by a wide margin"?

Is it an asset? The kind that can be converted into money, users, or a line item on a platform's report? Or is it just a number on its own?

Before calculating this, we need to clarify the number itself first. I checked, and looking at the director's track record on Youku over the past three years, judging solely by ratings, it's a very rare curve.

In the 2024 summer season, "The Last Bends" premiered. It opened with an 8.1 Douban rating, now at 7.9, making it the highest-rated domestic suspense drama that year.

On December 13, 2025, the National Memorial Day; "Against Human Atrocity" premiered. It opened with an 8.5 rating, closed at 8.7, and now sits at 9.0. It was also the highest-rated domestic drama on Douban in 2025.

On July 3, 2026, "Cold Case" premiered. It opened with an 8.7 rating, and as of July 26 when I'm writing this, it's at 7.5.

Three years. Three dramas. Each one was a top-tier hit in its respective year.

You can hardly find a second example of this level of consistency in the Chinese drama industry. A director has consecutively delivered a top-ranked drama every year for three years, spanning three completely different genres: suspense, historical, and criminal investigation.

To put it bluntly, among these three works, the rating of "Against Human Atrocity" comes from a different measurement standard. It's a 731-themed work, premiered on the National Memorial Day.

The rating baseline for this type of work is inherently higher than that of commercial genre dramas. When audiences rate it, they're not just judging the drama itself.

Even if we adjust its score down a notch, the remaining two dramas are still the top in their respective release windows. What we're adjusting is the magnitude of its advantage.

The question arises: what kind of scale is used to measure the term "number one"?

The same "Cold Case" has a 9.9 opening rating on Hupu and 7.5 on Douban. Even within Douban itself, opinions are sharply divided; two different groups of people are rating two completely different things.

Let's look at the rating distribution. "Cold Case" has a typical F-shaped distribution on Douban:

Five-star ratings account for 27.6%, while one-star ratings make up only 2.6%. A drama that can achieve this shape shows that audiences who got into it genuinely recognize its quality, and almost no one feels cheated after finishing it.

But this shape also reveals another fact: it only measures "people who actually watched the drama thoroughly."

To rate a drama, you have to actively open Douban, find the entry, click in, select a star rating, and complete this whole sequence of actions. People who are willing to do this are already a small group that has something to say about the drama.

What about those who swiped away halfway? Those who thought the pace was too slow after two episodes? Those who never even got recommended the drama? They're not included in this score.

I know some people will say that Douban ratings are no longer reliable, with fan manipulation, trolls spamming bad scores, and plenty of people rating without even watching. That's true.

And low-threshold simultaneous broadcast dramas on TV and online like "Cold Case" are especially vulnerable to this. Airing on CCTV-8, anyone can catch clips of it, and anyone can give it a one-star rating.

These noises do exist, but they haven't caused much damage here. With the 2.6% one-star ratio, the possibility of "being dragged down by malicious ratings" has already been ruled out.

The real issue is the measurement standard. What exactly do Douban ratings measure?

It measures "how much people who finished watching recognize the work" — it's a satisfaction indicator. It naturally cannot answer another question: how many people watched it.

A drama could have 100 viewers, 95 of whom give it five stars. It could also have 10 million viewers, 2 million of whom give it five stars. These two scenarios could result in the exact same Douban score.

Therefore, strictly speaking, the phrase "highest-rated drama of the year" only describes one thing: among the group of people willing to rate it, it ranks first.

Satisfaction is a tangible, valuable thing. It determines how word-of-mouth spreads, the confidence for renewals, and whether a director can get better resources for their next work.

It just can't be used as an asset on its own. An asset has to be convertible into other things.

Youku's bets on Director Suan over the past three years aren't just for three "everyone who finished watching loves it" satisfaction metrics. To turn these into a line item on the financial report, there's a key hurdle to cross — that hurdle is organizational structure.

……

What does that mean? What Youku essentially bought is a proven talent. And this proof happened before he joined the company.

On October 17, 2024, Director Suan joined Alibaba Entertainment and established the Sanbianpo Studio, the first director-led drama studio in the entire system.

Before him, Alibaba Entertainment already had more than 20 drama studios. The list of their founders is as follows:

Dun Qi, producer of "Empresses in the Palace"; Yin Xiangjin, former general manager of Wanda Pictures; Yan Bei, former CEO of Yanyu Film & Television; and Wang Jin, founder of Beijing Time Light. All of them are producers, without exception.

Xie Ying, Vice President of Youku, stated on that day that she looked forward to more idealistic, mission-driven directors who are willing to elevate the industry joining the platform.

The subtext of this statement is that they're just starting down this path.

I went through the timelines of the three dramas and found an easily overlooked detail. "The Last Bends" aired in the summer of 2024, back when he hadn't joined the company yet.

That work that earned him the title of one of the "Four New Outstanding Directors of Chinese Drama" alongside Shen Ao, Xin Shuang, and Xu Hongyu was made when he was still outside the system.

Up to now, the actual sample corresponding to the studio system is two dramas. This number matters a lot — it determines the nature of this organizational structure.

In the three years leading up to early 2025, the number of studios grew from single digits to 20. These moves looked like building a talent cultivation pipeline. But when it comes to Director Suan, the logic is much simpler.

First, identify someone who can consistently deliver high-quality works outside the system, then use an organizational structure to bring them in and lock them in.

The risks the platform takes were already validated for it before the director joined. What changed after he came on board?

He himself has talked about this.

According to Director Suan, he went from being a partner to a colleague with the operations, marketing, and IP derivatives teams. This allows for much earlier collaboration, so the production process can already take promotion, broadcast scheduling, and post-release operations into consideration.

This statement sounds like polite small talk, but its true weight lies in another line.

Alibaba Entertainment rebranded as Orca Entertainment in May 2025. In an interview this July, he mentioned that after joining Orca, he can access real-time broadcast data and the most genuine audience feedback from the backend at any time.

Based on the data they obtained, the audience's engagement with dramas of the same theme typically peaks between episodes 8 and 9. Around the 8th and 9th episodes, there's a very obvious drop-off point where many viewers stop watching.

A director who has access to the platform's drop-off curve can then design the structure of a drama accordingly. Let's look at the structure of "Cold Case."

The entire series has 17 episodes, split into two independent story arcs: the first case "The Serial Robbery at the Jewelry Store" spans 9 episodes, and the second case "The Robbery at Bian's Inn" has 8 episodes. The break point falls exactly at episode 9, no more, no less.

After the first case finished airing, the drama went on a 11-day hiatus. The second case wasn't released until July 22.

A 17-episode drama was split and released like two separate mini-series of 9 and 8 episodes. The cut point aligns exactly with the viewer drop-off number he mentioned earlier.

The term "anti-routine" has been used to describe this drama many times. Revealing the murderer as early as the second episode, abandoning the whodunit format, and having a slower pace than similar works — these are indeed creative choices.

The 9+8 structure is a different matter entirely. It looks more like a conclusion from a product design document.

Putting this into the industry context makes its position clearer. Think about it, how do platforms manage content? It's similar to building a house. Whoever you appoint as the general contractor determines what the final building will look like.

There are three common approaches in the market.

The first approach: the developer calls the shots. They acquire the land, decide the layout, calculate the costs, then find designers everywhere to draw the plans. The designers are hired to do the work, and they don't get a say in what the final house looks like. This is the producer-centered system.

By early 2025, iQiyi had over 30 studios, and Tencent Video had more than 20 teams, all following this model.

The second approach: directly bring the designer into the company. They're there from the moment the land is acquired. The layout isn't pre-determined and handed to them; they're involved from the start, and they get to decide how the building is constructed.

The Sanbianpo Studio follows this model.

The third, more extreme approach: standardize the blueprints first, so whoever does the construction gets the same result — the self-production center of Hongguo Short Drama does exactly this. According to early 2025 standards, they release hundreds of short dramas every month, and share revenue from viewership with external screenwriters.

These three models all answer the same question: who is the center of content production?

The mainstream bets on producers, as they're closest to the budget and risk control. Hongguo bets on screenwriters because it prioritizes volume. Youku's move to bet on directors is a wager on the stability of aesthetic quality.

I have to present another possible explanation here. Maybe the order is reversed. Maybe this structure didn't produce the high quality — maybe Director Suan picked a platform that was willing to give him creative freedom.

He mentioned that from "Madhouse" to "The Cloud" and then to "The Last Bends," almost all his works were on Youku. This is a narrative of a creator choosing a partner, and it doesn't prove the platform's inherent capability.

So, based on the materials available today, these two explanations can't be separated from each other.

There's another thing: this organizational structure comes with a price. When a director joins the company, they gain access to backend data. But at the same time, the data can also monitor them. The viewer drop-off line can be used to design the drama structure, but it can also be used to evaluate performance results.

When a creator moves their desk into the platform, the advanced collaborative capabilities they gain come hand in hand with the accountability of having their work measured by data — they're two sides of the same coin.

……

Now that we've clarified the trade-offs, how many people can a top-rated summer drama (leading by a wide margin) actually attract to watch?

This isn't an easy question to answer. Before calculating, we have to set some ground rules, otherwise the numbers we get will be inaccurate.

"Cold Case" is simultaneously broadcast on TV and online. It airs at 9:30 PM on CCTV's drama channel, with Youku and Migu Video streaming it at the same time. But the Yunhe Data that measures online broadcast performance only counts effective views of the full episodes on streaming platforms.

It doesn't capture any viewership from people watching on traditional TV sets.

Then there's the previously mentioned hiatus — the 11-day gap between the end of the first case and the release of the second. The 2.9% market share on July 14 and 2.2% on July 18 both fell within this window.

For a drama that wasn't updating, its market share naturally dropped. I can't use these two numbers for analysis.

I checked the Yunhe daily ranking on July 5. All dramas were updating normally that day, with no hiatuses or paid advanced releases.

"The Ask 2" 14.4%. "Mo Li" 11.6%. "Last Night Comes" 9.3%. "Love Has Smoke" 9.3%. "Cold Case" 4.7%.

Notice the line for "Last Night Comes" — a suspense drama from iQiyi's Misty Theater, same release window, same genre, updating on the same day. 9.3% vs 4.7% means "Cold Case" started with only half the viewership of its counterpart.

Let's look at another, more striking comparison.

"Low-IQ Crime" on iQiyi, 24 episodes. No A-list stars, no big IP, 8.2 on Douban — a score even higher than "Cold Case." It has a 27.6% Yunhe market share, over 550 million total views across the platform, and an average of 35 million views per episode during its hit period.

This 27.6% is calculated based on the hit period standard, which isn't the same scale as "Cold Case's" single-day ranking. The only comparable aspect is the magnitude of their performance.

Both rely on content quality rather than star power. One has a higher score and reached the top tier of the industry, while the other stays at the lower end of single-digit market share. The statement "word-of-mouth dramas never attract large audiences" no longer holds true in 2026.

The overall market size can't be the scapegoat either. According to Yunhe's half-year report:

In the first half of 2026, the total effective full-episode views of the top 20 long dramas across all platforms reached 20 billion, down 8% year-on-year. This decline is significantly narrower than the 28% drop in the first half of 2025. There were 110 new domestic dramas, 27 fewer than the same period last year.

The market is still shrinking, but the rate of decline is slowing down. The high-end market still exists.

Let me add the other side of the story: that second-prime-time slot on CCTV-8 is a strong endorsement for the content.

"Against Human Atrocity" premiered on the National Memorial Day, and later even gained international recognition. The value brought by this kind of theme doesn't show up in broadcast viewership rankings. Its S-tier rating translates to premium sponsorship value, and the brand of "high-quality content" will be written into the company's strategic narrative.

All these values are real, but none of them appear in Yunhe's statistics.

If what Youku is buying is exactly these values, then the online broadcast performance of "Cold Case" isn't a failure — it's using a controllable cost to obtain a set of values that can't be counted in viewership numbers.

This narrative makes logical sense