I, a 30-year-old construction contractor, dare not earn 1000 yuan even for just one minute.

On the afternoon of August 24, when *China Entrepreneur* met Shi Yiyuan in an old office building in Zhengzhou, he had just hung up a phone call.

The old air conditioner with level 5 energy consumption in the room was running with effort. The walls and cabinets are filled with commemorative photos of film crews' opening ceremonies and trophies, and a script for a male-oriented short drama that has not been filmed is spread out on the table. This was given to him by an old friend — some of the platform short drama projects he used to cooperate with frequently in the past two years have been suspended. The old friend has filmed 4 works by himself, which are said to be all hits. Now he wants to set up another team and invite Shi Yiyuan to invest and produce together.

The old friend will contribute more than 300,000 yuan, and asks him to invest another 100,000 yuan.

"That's why I've been on the phone asking about the market situation just now," he said. "I haven't started any filming projects since the Spring Festival, and I've been working on AI all the time. I know all about the current AI market, but if I'm going to shoot short dramas, I definitely need to inquire about everything from all sides."

The figures he got after inquiring are as follows: The leading actors who used to earn 8,000 to 10,000 yuan per day last year now accept 3,000 to 5,000 yuan for some projects; a middle-aged actor he often cooperated with quoted 1,500 yuan per day last year, but now he will take jobs for as low as 500 yuan per day, even so, he can only work for at most ten days a month. The field staff used to get 400 yuan a day normally, but now it is heard that some people are willing to take the job for 200 yuan a day. For most types of work, the price reduction almost starts at "cut in half".

"There's no way," he said. "The general environment is bad, and everyone has no work. If you don't cut your price, no one will look for you. But even if you cut the price again, even if you work for free, sometimes no one will come to you, and all your efforts will be in vain."

He counted the whereabouts of some acquaintances on his fingers: an actor who was still a leading role at the beginning of the year went to sell houses; a middle-aged actor looked for him to do AI in April, but now he is working as a security guard; other friends have opened clothing stores, live streaming studios, or become feng shui and numerology consultants...

In the past three years, Zhengzhou has been called "Short Drama Studio City" in the industry. According to industry data, there are thousands of micro-short drama enterprises and nearly 40,000 practitioners gathered here, with a market size of nearly 10 billion yuan, and nearly 100 new projects starting shooting every day. Most of them are small and medium-sized companies.

In the week before the 2026 Spring Festival, two things happened one after another: Hongguo Short Drama (hereinafter referred to as "Hongguo") shrunk its minimum guarantee policy, and production companies across the country that held large minimum guarantee quotas received notices almost on the same day — all projects that had not started shooting must be stopped; shortly after that, ByteDance officially released the video generation model Seedance 2.0, and the production threshold of AI short dramas was broken through again. After the Spring Festival, the production capacity of live-action short dramas began to "collapse" across the country.

According to the usual rhythm of previous years, mid-March should have been the peak season for resuming work. But up to now, Shi Yiyuan has only made 4 live-action dramas this year, 2 of which have not been launched yet. The company with more than ten employees has taken a long vacation of more than a month. "I'm just like a contractor," he positioned himself this way, "the upstream has no work to do, so the downstream can only close down for rest."

01

Undercurrent

This 30-year-old "contractor" is from Weishi, Henan Province, and graduated from the Film Performance Department of Dalian Art College in 2019. He was born in a rural area and was brought up by his grandparents since he was a child, while his parents went to work in other provinces very early. Before graduation, he found a job as a short video director in Beijing, and the contract was almost negotiated, but his girlfriend was in Zhengzhou, and his family urged him to settle down, so he gave up the opportunity.

After returning to Zhengzhou, he had no work for a while. He went to the supermarket where his girlfriend worked to apply for a reserve cadre position. He passed the interview, but on the day he was about to sign the contract, an advertising company called him and asked him to audition for an actor. Since he hadn't signed the contract there, he went to the advertising company for an interview. He was extremely excited that he could finally return to his own profession.

Zhengzhou is a highland of domestic information flow advertisements. He didn't know that at that time, and even thought he had entered a "pyramid selling organization". Later, he found the work was very simple, which was mainly to shoot drainage advertisements for teaching auxiliary apps and various consumer loan products, "I could shoot dozens of videos at most in one day". The last line of the lines was always: Click the link below the video to download it.

Looking back now, Shi Yiyuan said that he had shot a type of content at that time, which was almost the embryonic form of short dramas — filming the climax clips of online novels into videos and distributing them, to guide users to the novel reading platforms. But those videos were not dramas, just a "hook" — a product grown from advertising genes, which was designed to pay for conversion rather than craftsmanship from the very first day. He didn't really realize this until several years later.

The life of an information flow advertisement actor is very "easy": the basic salary is 4,000 yuan, working from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with weekends off, and you can rest when there is no work. The restlessness in his heart could not be suppressed, so he resigned when the company was about to confirm his formal employment and pay social insurance and housing fund for him. During that period, he took the postgraduate entrance examination for the Directing Department of Beijing Film Academy — he didn't review a single word, and joked to the invigilator when handing in the paper: Teacher, wait for me, I will definitely pass the exam next year.

After he came back from Beijing after the exam, on November 12, 2019, he registered Henan Yiyingyuan Film Media Co., Ltd. in Zhengzhou. He earned a total of more than 10,000 yuan by the end of the year, "which was even less than working in a company, but at that time I just had the spirit of taking risks".

This enterprising spirit supported him to get through the COVID-19 epidemic. He not only shot medium-length videos to earn playback subsidies, but also ran to the gold wholesale market every day to shoot "gold price store exploration" videos, and earned 100 to 200 yuan per order by purchasing gold for fans. In 2022, the information flow advertisement industry exploded, and he could rush to several shooting groups in one day, seamlessly switching between "loser man" and "dominant president" roles, and his daily salary could reach 800 yuan, even 1,000 yuan.

At that time, a live streaming form called "live drama" also emerged on platforms such as Kuaishou: when the plot of wealthy family grievances reached the emotional peak, the anchor would start selling goods. He usually played the "villain" role: "The first time I played this role, the memory is very deep. The anchor was in a stinky pigsty, and my part was to kick the door open and shout 'pay back the money'. The popularity of the live stream that day was incredibly high." This supporting role could also earn 500 to 600 yuan per session.

In the middle of 2022, a friend asked him to act in a short drama. 30 episodes were filmed in one day, which shocked him. There were two cameras facing two groups of actors on site: one group was facing the camera acting, the other group was reciting lines next to them, and there was another person holding a notebook off the frame to speak lines for them. Anyone who forgot the lines would go down to recite, and the one who just finished reciting would take over, almost every shot was done in one take.

At 5 p.m. that day, he had to rush to act in a live drama, worrying that he couldn't finish the filming, but the director let him leave before the time was up. He was very happy that he could earn two salaries in one day, which felt like a windfall, but he didn't know he was stepping into a new industry that would expand wildly in the next few years.

02

The Last Link

After entering the industry, Shi Yiyuan only took a few months to become a director.

In December 2022, someone asked him to direct a 100-episode drama, which was finished in five days, with a director fee of 1,500 yuan per day. The first day he filmed until three or four in the morning, and the next day he went to work at six or seven in the morning. He took a bite of the steamed bun, only to find there was blood on it — after staying up all night, his lips were chapped and bleeding. He heard that the drama had invested tens of thousands of yuan, but the specific investment amount and revenue had nothing to do with him.

This is the most typical survival form in the short drama industrial chain. Most companies in Zhengzhou do short drama contracted production, taking orders from platforms or large companies and earning a price difference. The pure contracted production profit rate recognized by the whole industry is 5% to 8%, while the film crew is an organization that burns money by the day — he has calculated that once the filming starts, the hard cost is at least 1 yuan per second, and a rain, a timeout of venue use, or a timeout of the leading actor and actress can eat up this little profit. The so-called contracted production fee is essentially not profit, but the basic price for the team to rent out their time.

Shi Yiyuan later figured out that what the first-tier suppliers really sell is not their production capacity, but the qualification to get orders from the platform. The pressure of advance payment, employment risks and uncertainties are pushed down layer by layer, and finally fall on the end of the industrial chain with the least bargaining power — only there, real people, real days and real cash are needed to fulfill the profits on the contract.

In the first two years of his career, he also caught up with a round of business model transformation. At the beginning, short dramas were dominated by mini-program payment, 80% to 90% of the revenue of a drama had to be used for traffic investment, and the withdrawal of recharge money from WeChat would also be deducted a certain percentage of fee. He heard that if the ROI of traffic investment was around 1.2, you could basically make money, and the withdrawal deduction percentage was still rising all the way, eating up the meager remaining profits.

Later, Douyin cut off the jump channel to WeChat mini-programs, and brought this part of traffic into its own ecosystem. In August 2023, Hongguo was launched, and it ran with a free model for a year. By the second half of 2024, free dramas and paid dramas each accounted for half of the market, and in the Spring Festival of the next year, free dramas became the mainstream. Shi Yiyuan had no concept of the scale of Hongguo, he only knew that most of the dramas he launched finally entered the work libraries of such free platforms.

In 2023, he went to a newly established company as an executive director. The agreed salary structure was a basic salary of more than 10,000 yuan plus a few percentage points of share, and what he valued was the share. After joining the job, as long as he was on the set during the shooting period, he basically had to work 16 hours a day, and could only sleep three to five hours on average. He had three episodes of palpitations and dyspnea. The huge pressure was too much to bear, so he left his job 3 months later.

Later, it happened that Migu wanted to shoot short dramas, and they found him in the first batch. The first one was a costume drama, which adopted the model of sharing costs and revenues, and Migu contributed most of the investment. But there was a rule in Hengdian film crews that you must recharge the payment first and then start shooting. Due to time constraints, the shooting period was cut from 7 days to 6 days. Under the premise of ensuring quality, he managed to finish the shooting tightly. The second drama *The Emperor's Ascension* was shot for 7 full days, but the data did not perform well after it was launched, and he did not get the share revenue, "I only earned the director's fee".

The third drama was *The Supreme Medical Lord*, which was also the closest he had ever been to "big money". The second broadcast of this drama was on the Hongguo platform, and it achieved good performance. He estimated that the split revenue settled by the platform to the copyright party might be as high as millions of yuan. But that money had nothing to do with him — he only agreed to the first-round share rights, and due to the dispute with the partner company, he didn't even get the director's fee. The only thing he got was a trophy of Migu's Annual Director Award.

From the perspective of small and medium-sized contracted producers, platforms are roughly divided into two categories: Migu belongs to one category, each project needs to go through the bidding process, which is relatively standardized, the benefits are distributed to many people, and the control is so strict that they can only shoot at most one drama per month.

Hongguo, on the other hand, concentrates the quotas on a few head companies, who have more work than they can handle, and can get hundreds of orders from the platform every month. But a film crew operating at full capacity can shoot at most 3 dramas a month — the production capacity cannot support the orders, and the unfinished orders can only be transferred down. Every time the order is subcontracted one layer, the price is "peeled off" one layer, until it falls into the hands of people who have no room to subcontract further.

In 2025, Shi Yiyuan began to take jobs from a large contracted production company. That company could produce more than 100 Hongguo dramas a month, and he could get 1 to 2 dramas a month. He was very clear about his position in the whole chain.

He compared Hongguo's subsidies to the "ride-hailing war" in those years: burning money to seize the market, and it is inevitable that the tide will ebb. For companies below the middle tier, the account period is always a sword hanging over their heads. At the end of 2025, when negotiating cooperation with a head production company again, the account period was being extended. When the final payment was settled at the end of the year, he heard that the other party even borrowed money and took loans to pay the balance. He was grateful for the kindness, but he didn't dare to cooperate again — the price was already very low, and if the account period was extended, the risk was too high to take.

03

Deliberation

After the Spring Festival, Shi Yiyuan started to work on AI. There are two reasons — there was no live-action drama to start shooting; two friends who worked on AI pulled him to start a partnership. "I'm not very interested in