Who has achieved huge success with AI short dramas?

In an era where anyone can produce short dramas, is it still possible to make money?

01

Can AI Celebrities Really Deliver on Their Promises?

If you have always dreamed of being a talent agent, here is an opportunity: you can get your own artist in just one or two months, who can make money for you and will never have a public scandal. Would you take it?

Exactly, I'm talking about AI celebrities. These days, "Fang Taozi" has re-energized my friends who are working on AI short dramas.

Fang Taozi is the protagonist of The Laid-Off Girl. After the first season of the 12-episode AI short drama was launched in June, it recorded over 270 million total views on Douyin, becoming a phenomenal hit short drama this year.

What's more impressive is that Fang Taozi's persona of a small-town girl bravely breaking into the modeling industry has touched many audiences, and she now has more than 400,000 followers.

Fang Taozi even got her first advertisement collaboration with a contact lens brand. It is reported that the brand paid more than 200,000 yuan to place its ad in the special episode of The Laid-Off Girl, where Fang Taozi promoted the product, saying "My contact lenses are super comfortable even after a whole day of wear", and "They have a highlighted fixed axis, so they won't shift even when you blink".

This ad was soon reported and taken offline. Because an AI digital human cannot wear real contact lenses at all, nor can it have the actual wearing experience. Is this false publicity? Who will be responsible for the product safety if it is recommended by Fang Taozi?

This issue is very familiar to lawyers. Two years ago, there was a heated discussion about whether AI would replace lawyers, and the core point was that AI lawyers cannot bear legal responsibility.

Mengmeng, who has been working on AI short dramas since this year's Spring Festival, said that using short dramas to build new talents and realize commercial monetization is a path many people are trying now.

So can AI celebrities make this path work? Mengmeng is not optimistic about it.

According to National Business Daily, Fang Taozi's ad quotation is very high: the price for a 1 to 60-second video ranges from 168,000 yuan to 258,000 yuan, which is higher than most real-life influencers with millions of followers, and even exceeds many influencers with tens of millions of followers.

In reality, the path for AI celebrities is still full of obstacles. Not to mention the responsibility definition issue for digital humans doing advertisements, a celebrity with followers needs continuous online and offline activities to make fans willing to pay. No one knows how a 2D-style digital persona can carry out such activities, and its only advantage may be that "it will never have a public scandal".

Moreover, digital humans can also lose followers. For example, after the second season of The Laid-Off Girl was launched, many fans unfollowed Fang Taozi because they were dissatisfied with the plot.

But this does not change the fact that Fang Taozi's story itself is an inspiring one. Actually, when discussing how Fang Taozi can operate, we cannot avoid the core question: how to replicate the success of The Laid-Off Girl.

Fang Taozi has been constantly posting graphic content to consolidate her persona

Mengmeng, who has been leading her team to produce AI short dramas since this year's Spring Festival, has recently started preparing to produce real-person short dramas. Mengmeng made money by taking her AI short dramas overseas, but as a small team, she cannot see a real and effective business model for producing AI short dramas in the domestic market.

Mengmeng started producing AI content almost at the same time as Fang Taozi's team. She works at a small content company, and spent the entire Spring Festival holiday this year learning to make AI short dramas, from using large language models to learning shot division by analyzing existing films.

She had some online novel works before, selected one of them, and finished making a 10-minute short drama in just a few days.

She did not choose the Hongguo short drama platform, but uploaded the drama to YouTube, and received very positive data feedback. After the Spring Festival, several members of her small team joined her to work on short dramas, and now their account has several series, bringing in a stable monthly income of thousands of US dollars.

02

Where Exactly Are the Opportunities?

The success model Mengmeng described is similar to that of The Laid-Off Girl, which is to use one's own advantageous resources to form differentiation.

Feifeifei, the producer of Fang Taozi, has many years of working experience in the fashion industry, and she invested her resources in Fang Taozi's outfit design. On social media, people have dug out every piece of clothing Taozi wore, clearly sorting out what the prototype is, what fashion shows it has been on, and what advertisements it has appeared in.

In fact, it is not difficult for people who follow the modeling industry to find that Fang Taozi's modeling is very close to the "money-making" face type in the real modeling industry.

Starting from her second work, Mengmeng has taken 3D modeling as her top priority. "Our team's advantage is that we understand what kind of characters and content can evoke emotional resonance in the female-oriented track, instead of being swiped away by audiences like ordinary short dramas. In addition, many short drama protagonists only look good from the front, but actually their several side profiles also need to be modeled, so that their faces will not be distorted in different shots."

Besides, Mengmeng tries her best to make all the resources in the short drama, including buildings, streets, the protagonist's costumes and weapons, as exquisite as possible. "When audiences click into our dramas, they will immediately notice the difference in quality," she said.

In fact, there have been a large number of recent cases where people created hit AI short films and short dramas through self-developed efforts.

For example, Zombie Cleaner, which became a hit in early May, was produced by MxShell, an amateur creator who claimed to be a secondary technical school graduate. This short film tells a story about a robot clearing zombies in the doomsday. With its tight rhythm and wonderful fighting scenes, it became popular from overseas to the domestic market.

Up to now, although there is still a slight uncanny valley effect, various AI short drama hits have emerged in endlessly. From ancient-style immortal cultivation to post-apocalyptic science fiction, all kinds of fantasy themes that require very high costs to perform in reality, such as werewolves, orcs, mermaids and vampires, can basically be realized at an extremely low cost as long as you give up some texture.

"What is being tested now is how creative you are. As long as you have a strength in creativity or aesthetics, you have the possibility to create a hit," said Momo, a producer who has been in the short drama industry for two or three years and has recently caught up with the trend of taking AI short dramas overseas and launched several hit dramas. "AI has greatly raised the lower limit of individual production."

But if we look at the medium and long-term performance, "the experience and skills that an individual or a small studio can master are indeed limited". If you cannot productize the content and continuously produce high-quality works, you cannot get continuous cash flow, so it will be difficult to sustain. To put it in plain terms, it is easy to make one hit, but to keep making hits, systematic support is still needed.

Even if you can keep generating new clips with AI, you still need to judge whether the generated clips are suitable and whether the market will like them. With the continuous price increase of Seedance, how many tokens will be burned in the process all require long-term time and experience accumulation.

03

Seedance 2.0 Is a Watershed

In the past six months, it has been an open secret that it is difficult to make money in China's AI short drama industry. Taking Fang Taozi, known as the biggest hit in the first half of the year, as an example, generally the largest source of income for short dramas is platform revenue sharing. For The Laid-Off Girl, how much income can 270 million views per season bring?

We can calculate it with this formula: Actual income = Total views ÷ 10000 × Unit price per 10,000 views × Revenue sharing ratio.

Douyin does not have a fixed revenue sharing ratio for AI comic dramas. Let's calculate it at 100% sharing ratio, the revenue per 10,000 views is about 5-10 yuan, and we take the upper limit of 10 yuan for calculation. Even in the best case, the maximum revenue sharing for this short drama is only 270,000 yuan.

In terms of cost, according to previous media reports, the team has less than 10 people, the production cycle for each episode is 3 to 4 days, and the first season has 12 episodes, so the estimated production cycle for one season is two to three months. At present, labor costs in the industry account for about half of the total cost. No matter how you calculate it, it is obvious that relying solely on traffic revenue sharing is far from enough to cover the cost.

This is still an extreme case. For most people, getting over 100 million views is nothing more than a dream. Just imagine, if you only have 100,000 or 1 million views, is your daily income enough to order takeout?

The myth of making huge fortune through short dramas last year came to an abrupt end, and the watershed was the launch of Seedance 2.0 in February this year. This AI video generation model was called "the strongest on the planet at present" by Feng Ji, the producer of Black Myth: Wukong.

After its launch, we tested it immediately and made a 15-second text-to-video work, which is really very smooth. The era when one single person can produce short dramas has arrived.

After Mengmeng tried it, she felt the call of opportunity: the opportunity to become a producer has come. All the entertainment activities during the Spring Festival became uninteresting to her, and she spent the entire Spring Festival holiday working with Seedance 2.0.

Like Feifeifei, the director and screenwriter of Fang Taozi, Mengmeng thinks that the biggest advantage of AI short dramas is that one person can do all the work, without having to consider how to organize the team, find leading actors, cameramen, dubbing staff and so on.

However, some teams that entered the AI short drama industry earlier believe that Seedance 2.0 is a nightmare, as the production threshold has been greatly reduced, leading to a short-term explosion of supply.

In the first half of 2026, 221,900 new AI micro short dramas were added on Douyin, accounting for 95% of the total short dramas in Q1 and 60% in Q2, but the hit rate was only 0.47%, and 5% of the top projects took away 70% of the total profits.

The massive influx of supply has led to two results: first, the platform revenue sharing has plummeted, and the unit price per 10,000 effective views has dropped sharply from 30 to 100 yuan in 2025 to 5 to 10 yuan. The phrase "5 yuan for 10,000 views of short dramas" once became a hot search topic; second, regulation followed, and the entry threshold for small teams has been greatly increased.

On social platforms, those bosses of AI short drama companies who invested a lot of money last year were completely frustrated, and their evaluation of this industry became all negative.

Of course, for teams with certain advantages, there are still opportunities to stand out. As for the future business model, even if you cannot bring goods through AI celebrities, you can at least build a successful IP.

In terms of product promotion, The Laid-Off Girl has not given up. Sharp-eyed audiences found that Mengniu's product placement appeared in the second season.

04

The Only Way Out Is to Go Global?

Momo believes that apart from focusing on creating hits, there are indeed many opportunities in the overseas market now, especially for small teams with creativity and execution, there is still a chance to get huge returns with small investments.

The most important reason is that the willingness to pay in overseas markets is still very high. Especially in the North American market, according to data from multiple media outlets, the payment rate was as high as 50% in the early stage of the market last year; now as the audience group expands, gradually penetrating from early middle-aged female audiences to younger groups, the payment rate still remains at 20%. Google and many other companies predict that the overseas short drama market will exceed 6 billion US dollars in 2026, with a year-on-year increase of 60%.

At the same time, the supply of short dramas in the North American market is far less sufficient than that in China. Therefore, as long as you develop works tailored to the preferences of the North American market, you will generally get good returns.

For example, Momo mentioned that two leading overseas platforms from China have launched a large number of short dramas that "referenced" the plot of the ice hockey-themed American TV drama The Peak Showdown, and these dramas are very popular on their respective platforms.

Secondly, China is the center of short drama production capacity in the world. After the ability to produce AI short dramas is acquired, the barriers of language and region are greatly reduced, and China's labor cost advantage can be fully utilized. The labor cost and even the token cost in the United States are far higher than those in China.

Lin Junkai, the founder of the short drama company Jingying Technology, told Caixin.com that "the European and American markets are the places with the most serious