A highly bingeable drama with not a single real human actor is driving overseas audiences utterly obsessed.

AI short dramas in China seem to be more short-lived than people expected.

At the start of the year, a flood of people rushed into the AI short drama industry, creating a sense of urgency that if you didn't step in right away, you would miss the chance forever.

But before overnight wealth could arrive, tightened regulation did first.

Starting from April, Hongguo took two consecutive crackdowns on low-quality AI short dramas: it first removed 3,522 titles on a small scale, and in May, it blocked and removed a total of 20,941 non-compliant comic dramas. The AI short drama *Bodhi Comes to the World*, which once topped the hit chart, was also taken down in this wave.

An industry insider told X.PIN that due to the huge volume of dramas being launched, disputes over non-compliant themes and portrait rights are very likely to occur. For dramas that used to be reviewed within 6 hours or on the same day on a certain platform, the review cycle has now been extended to 3-5 days, and some platforms even have dramas held for more than 20 days still under review.

The overall pass rate for AI short drama reviews has dropped to only 20%-30%.

For small and medium-sized teams that survive by "continuous launch and constant trial and error", slower review and blocked themes are just the beginning. The bigger problem is that dramas cannot be released, and teams cannot get paid. At the same time, the platform's revenue share ratio is gradually being reduced.

In a short drama exchange group, news about team dissolution and layoffs pops up from time to time.

Occasionally someone will share a merged chat record, and the authenticity of the content is unconfirmed, but the messages inside such as all AI short dramas being suspended, or being reminded by the platform to hide works, still make everyone panicky.

The industry that was still bustling just a few months ago has suddenly fallen quiet.

Teams that can no longer keep up simply disband, while those that still have the energy to struggle start shifting from AI live-action short dramas to 2D and 3D comic dramas that carry less review pressure...

And another group of people decided to go overseas to take a new gamble.

#The trend of AI short dramas has also spread to overseas markets

Lu Yu (pseudonym) is an employee of a domestic short drama company. In April this year, their team fully shifted their business to overseas markets.

With almost no hesitation, they wrapped up the unfinished domestic projects in hand and plunged into the overseas local drama market.

It was only half a year since they shifted from live-action short dramas to AI short dramas and comic dramas.

Two shifts in half a year. Theoretically, such frequent adjustments would have already bankrupted a company, but in this industry, it is just the normal pace to keep up with the trend changes.

In fact, there are a large number of teams like Lu Yu's.

Several AI short drama teams that X.PIN contacted have all put "overseas expansion" on their agenda between March and May this year. In just a few months, "going overseas" has almost become the most frequently mentioned phrase in the industry.

If you search for content related to AI short drama overseas expansion on Xiaohongshu, you will find many people leaving comments like "looking for connection" and "seeking cooperation", and everyone is busy exploring possible channels.

A team leader named Cheng Zi (pseudonym) we talked to was almost scammed over this matter.

At the end of May, he planned to settle in the TikTok Short Drama Creator Platform, when an organization took the initiative to contact him, claiming to be "the largest agent for TikTok short dramas" and saying they could help apply for relevant qualifications for a fee.

The scammer's quoted price was cut from 20,000 yuan at the beginning all the way down to 5,000 yuan. Cheng Zi felt more and more that something was wrong, so he refused to pay, and later he successfully got his account running by figuring out the process on his own.

Of course, not every trend is real, but at least from the data perspective, the trend of overseas AI short dramas is indeed growing stronger.

Data from DataEye shows that in 2025, the global market size of AI short dramas (including comic dramas) was about 100 million U.S. dollars, and this figure is expected to rise to 650 million U.S. dollars in 2026.

Meanwhile, the May revenue report of TikTok short dramas shows that the single-month revenue share exceeded 21 million U.S. dollars, equivalent to more than 140 million RMB. Among them, the revenue share of AI short dramas exceeded 6.5 million U.S. dollars, a 40% month-on-month increase.

However, data is just data. What really makes many teams believe this business is promising is the feedback from overseas audiences.

Those AI short dramas with fruit or animal avatars performing overbearing president, counterattack and revenge plots have been trending on TikTok for more than half a year.

An AI fruit romance variety show gained 300 million views in 9 days, but it was later taken down due to excessively vulgar content and plagiarism...

The related TikTok account has accumulated more than 6 million followers.

Another type of realistic human AI short drama has also achieved impressive performance with its dedicated theater accounts.

Surprisingly, some AI short dramas only change the subtitles to foreign languages, while keeping the original Chinese dubbing, and they can still get millions or tens of millions of views.

In some comment sections, you can even see foreign audiences taking AI short dramas as their must-watch programs before going to bed every day.

It is not hard to imagine that if AI short dramas can gain market share on a global and diversified platform like TikTok, they will definitely perform even better on those dedicated overseas short drama platforms.

Now many overseas short drama platforms operated by domestic companies have also started to add AI short dramas to their own apps.

However, according to X.PIN's observation, different platforms have different levels of investment in AI short dramas. NetShort from Maiya and DramaWave from Kunlun Wanwei are quite aggressive in this field.

It can be seen that in the June top 100 overseas AI drama list released by the DataEye Research Institute, almost the top 15 titles are dominated by NetShort and DramaWave.

By the way, the names of these apps are almost all similar, either containing "Drama", "Short" or "Reels", as if they are afraid that others will not know they are in the short drama business.

In addition to increasing their own production capacity, these platforms are also actively looking for domestic production teams to cooperate, allowing them to launch AI short dramas on their own apps.

In April this year, Tinghuadao even invested 1 billion yuan at once, saying it would cooperate with Zhangwan's FlickReels to layout overseas AI short dramas, offering a maximum minimum guarantee of 100,000 yuan for original scripts, and recruiting overseas chief editors and directors with annual salaries up to 600,000+ yuan.

It looks like they are fully prepared to make a big splash in overseas markets.

For Lu Yu, Cheng Zi and other people in the industry, the fact that someone provides the platform, someone accepts the content, and someone is willing to pay for AI short dramas also means more certainty.

Since there is a chance, why not give it a try?

#Take a gamble, and you may get a huge return

The overseas market is far less competitive than the domestic market.

This is the biggest impression X.PIN got after communicating with several industry practitioners.

We originally thought that shifting to producing AI short dramas overseas would mean the whole team had to completely restructure their workflow.

But after talking to people in the industry, we found that there is not much difference between domestic and overseas production. The office remains the same, the team is still the original group of people, the scriptwriters keep writing scripts, the image generators keep producing images, and the editors keep doing editing work.

The only difference is that the character design images are changed to European and American faces, the background is shifted to overseas scenarios, and finally English subtitles and dubbing are added, then an overseas AI short drama is basically completed.

So in terms of cost, there is no difference between producing AI short dramas overseas and in the domestic market.

Moreover, platforms are also actively lowering the threshold to improve their AI short drama ecosystem.

For example, for TikTok, you needed to apply for the whitelist to settle in the short drama creator platform back in February, but according to Lu Yu, you can directly apply for settlement in May and June.

This is also the reason why those so-called agents who keep cutting their prices get no responses. X.PIN even saw someone offering a full-process package for only 600 yuan a few days ago.

In addition, the TikTok Short Drama Creator Platform also supports multi-language AI translation. When you upload a drama, you don't need to modify the title, cover, subtitles and dubbing by yourself, the backend will automatically translate them into languages of multiple countries and regions.

According to feedback from Lu Yu's team, the accuracy of this backend translation is quite high, and since you are targeting a global market when operating TikTok, the distribution efficiency will be greatly improved with so many markets available.

Of course, low threshold is only one aspect. In their words, the overseas dividends are also very tangible.

First of all, the natural traffic is a big difference between overseas and domestic AI short dramas.

X.PIN learned that for several leading domestic short drama and comic drama platforms, it is almost impossible to achieve good performance relying only on natural traffic. Most of the traffic has to be obtained through paid promotion or influencers, and the revenue is highly dependent on paid promotion.

But on overseas platforms like YouTube and TikTok, you just need to publish the works, for example, the AI short dramas that Lu Yu's team uploaded to TikTok on the same day can easily get hundreds of thousands of views, which is almost impossible to achieve in the domestic market.

More importantly, under the condition that the cost is basically the same, there is an extra part of revenue from overseas markets.

According to Lu Yu, the revenue per 10,000 views on domestic platforms is basically in the range of 2-15 RMB, but the revenue per 10,000 views of TikTok short dramas can reach more than 20 RMB.

Secondly, the overseas creative space is relatively more relaxed.

Some relatively sensitive themes in China such as BL can basically be tried overseas. Except that YouTube has clear restrictions on the cute baby theme, there are not so many rigid restrictions for the time being.