The get-rich-quick myth of AI short dramas has fizzled out in merely half a year.

"Live-action short dramas went through all the tropes of feature films and TV series back then, and AI short dramas have now repeated the exact path of live-action short dramas."

When Chang Wenbo (pseudonym) said these words, his tone was so calm that it bordered on numbness.

This is not our first conversation with him. He has been involved in the short drama sector since 2023, and has almost witnessed the entire transition of the industry from live-action to AI-generated content.

At the end of last year, he spoke with great eloquence about AI and short dramas, speaking fast and putting forward a steady stream of judgments. This time, things are different.

As soon as he was asked about the quotation, he suddenly became cautious. When pressed further, he simply confessed: "The figures I mentioned are not that accurate actually, because I rarely communicate with the industry about these so-called average statistics."

A person who is so familiar with quotations that he can recite them like breathing suddenly stammers when talking about prices. This aphasia itself is the best footnote to the industry.

Over the past six months, the production quotation for standardized AI short dramas has plummeted from 5,000 yuan per minute to several hundred yuan, a drop of more than 90%, and the price has approached the bottom line of production cost; the matching custom digital human service has dived from 300,000-600,000 yuan to a level that can be implemented for only a few thousand yuan.

Data from the China Netcasting Services Association shows that about 128,000 micro short dramas were launched across the industry in the first quarter of 2026, of which about 122,000 were AI-generated micro short dramas, accounting for more than 95% — while the total number of micro short dramas launched and broadcast in the whole year of 2025 was only 33,000.

Supply is exploding while losses are spreading: about 90% of AI short drama companies are in a loss-making state; among the 221,900 AI short dramas launched on Douyin in the first half of the year, only 1,055 have exceeded 100 million views, with a hit rate of 0.47%.

Chang Wenbo is not surprised by this. He even has a more harsh comment: "I predicted very early that in the era of AI short dramas, production companies have no way to survive." Regarding the plunge in prices, "I thought it would take a year to happen, but I didn't expect it to arrive in just half a year."

Also on a Saturday, Feng Shao (pseudonym), vice president and producer of Forest Pictures Film and Television, put forward another judgment over the phone: this round of price drop is a "double-edged sword" for the whole industry, but "a good thing" for his own company: the industry is currently in a phase of clearing out unqualified players.

"When the production quality returns to a benign state, your production precision will instead become a scarce resource that others value."

One is numb, the other is expectant. Behind the two completely opposite attitudes lies the same wave of price cuts.

01

The Free Fall of a Price Curve

Forest Pictures, a company with a background in traditional film and television, took on a national-level AI project with a historical theme in October 2025.

"At that time, the quotation was very considerable, close to 10,000 to 15,000 yuan per minute", while the common market quotation at the same period was 3,000-5,000 yuan per minute. The reason for the high price was obvious: historical theme, 1:1 restoration precision, and quality higher than ordinary AI animation dramas.

However, this price system did not last for a year.

At the end of 2025, when investors came to them for 2D animation dramas, the quotation had already slipped to 1,000-1,500 yuan per minute, and suppliers in other cities offered 400-1,000 yuan; the price of 3D and realistic human projects dropped from 3,000-5,000 yuan to 1,000-2,000 yuan.

"This year, a friend told me about the automated workflow platform that can generate content with one click, and the quotation is even as low as several dozen yuan per minute — that's already very ridiculous."

Ridiculous, but real. Li Juncheng, founder of Wujin Wuliang, has the same experience: the market quotation was still 2,000 yuan per minute at the beginning of the year, and now it is 1,000-1,500 yuan — a 50% drop within half a year. "There was no particularly sharp drop at any point, it kept falling continuously, several hundred yuan each time."

Please note the wording of this top-tier studio founder: he is not "shocked", but has a calmness that is almost insensitive, exactly the same as Chang Wenbo's feeling.

This numbness is not dullness, but muscle memory. They have been working all the way since the era of live-action short dramas, witnessed repeated policy adjustments on Douyin, saw production costs cut in half overnight, and watched peers build their business empires and then collapse within half a year.

But it is precisely this numbness that allows them to see the end point earlier than others: because "everyone can do it", the "cake will definitely be divided into many small pieces"; the threshold is so low that anyone can start their own business, and companies that make a living purely from production are doomed to have no way to survive.

"For the current quotation, I thought it would take a year to drop to this level, but I didn't expect it to happen in half a year." The realization of this rule is not news for a numb person.

Why can the quotation keep falling below the cost line? The answer lies in the rewriting of the cost structure.

Feng Shao has dismantled the real accounts of a 2D animation drama: the total cost is 80,000-100,000 yuan, the duration is about 120 minutes, the script accounts for 10%-15%, computing power accounts for about 30%, and the remaining 60% is labor — including video generation, post-production, packaging, and dubbing.

The batch production structure given by Li Juncheng is a completely different picture: the script costs only a few thousand yuan per work, computing power accounts for 50%-60%, and labor cost is compressed to 10%-20%.

Putting the two sets of figures together, the essence of this round of price cuts is clear: when the automated workflow connects all links: novels are generated into scripts with one click, scripts are generated into storyboard prompts with one click, and then converted into images and videos. The scriptwriting, storyboarding and post-production links that used to take up 60% of the budget are completely swallowed by a canvas-style platform, and the main remaining part of the cost is computing power.

Therefore, the plunge in AI short drama quotations is not a vicious price competition, but the pricing anchor has shifted from "man-hours" to "model Tokens". The price can only keep falling along with the improvement of model capabilities, which also explains why the cost line itself is constantly moving down.

Not only that, courses that teach AI skills for 9.9 yuan and promise that you can master them and learn to monetize in 3 days have sold tens of thousands of copies on major platforms. With one computer and a set of AI tools, short drama production that used to require a starting capital of millions of yuan can now be completed by ordinary people through the whole process.

DataEye Research Institute predicts that among the 400 billion yuan market size in 2026, the market size of AIGC video large models in the AI drama and animation drama sector will exceed 200 billion yuan. In the first half of the year, the total number of practitioners and individual creators related to AI dramas and animation dramas has exceeded 500,000, and "everyone can create" is rewriting the boundary of the film and television industry.

A 120-minute AI short drama can be delivered at a minimum cost of several thousand yuan, which is equivalent to dozens of yuan per minute: it is not that the quotation is crazy, but that the value of the "human" part has been emptied by technology.

02

The Other Side of 90% Loss Rate:

The Money Has Not Disappeared, It Just Flowed to Different Pockets

Although the price has dropped by 90%, the demand has not disappeared.

Data from QuestMobile shows that the unique users of the short drama industry have reached 851 million in May 2026, among which the monthly active users of Hongguo Free Short Drama is 356 million, nearly doubling year on year. The average daily usage time per person exceeds two hours, leaving traditional online video platforms far behind.

Users are still there, attention is still there, so where did the money go?

First look at the production side. In the first half of the year, 221,900 AI short dramas flooded into Douyin, and only 1,055 of them had more than 100 million views; measured by the break-even line of 50 million views, less than 1.3% of the works can recover the cost — roughly only 1 out of 77 new dramas can barely break even.

Chen Wei, head of AI technology at China Literature, holds a similar view: Only AI short dramas with more than 40 million views have a chance to make profits, and such "hits" account for less than 1%.

Li Juncheng's judgment is more direct: "Among the hundreds of thousands of AI dramas on the market now, 90% are loss-making."

Feng Shao has a sample around him that condenses the industry cycle: a partner launched a 2D drama in April, with a cost of less than 100,000 yuan, and a revenue sharing of more than 200,000 yuan, doubling the profit margin; so they increased investment to expand production, but in June, the new drama they launched had a revenue sharing of less than several thousand yuan.

It only took two months from huge profit to loss — the speed of supply influx is faster than anyone's speed of learning arbitrage experience.

Then look at the distribution side, the money mainly flows to two pockets: short drama platforms and computing power providers.

The shift on the platform side is particularly thought-provoking.

Feng Shao recalled that when they produced high-quality live-action dramas last April, Hongguo still adopted the model of covering the full production cost, and the budget for one high-quality drama was nearly 2 million yuan; in the first half of this year, they launched the "Thousand Dramas Plan", and the minimum guarantee for a single drama dropped to 200,000-300,000 yuan; in the latest matchmaking plan, the minimum guarantee was further reduced to 130,000-220,000 yuan, accounting for less than 10% of the production cost of a high-quality drama.

"The policy still exists in name, but fewer and fewer projects can get approved, and this amount of money is just a token of support as a favor." Feng Shao said so.

Previous surveys by Blue Whale Technology confirmed this: in July, Hongguo switched the Thousand Dramas Plan from the minimum guarantee model to an investment matchmaking model. Under the conventional matchmaking model, the platform no longer provides production minimum guarantee funds, and producers can only get 25% of the revenue share.

The revenue sharing system is also opaque.

Feng Shao told Business Data Alliance, The revenue sharing for 10,000 views of high-quality dramas is only about 5-10 yuan, and the calculation formula is the platform's "black box". "After a drama is finished, you have no idea whether you can recover the cost or not."

According to data from DataEye Drama Check cited by Securities Times, a cruel scissors gap has taken shape: the cost on the production side has dropped by about 90%, but the traffic cost has risen by more than 100% year on year, and the revenue per thousand views has dropped from about 60 yuan in the second half of 2025 to 15-30 yuan.

Production has become cheaper, but getting noticed has become more expensive. This wave of price cuts has eliminated exactly those companies that "only know how to produce".

Just as Chang Wenbo judged: "In the era of AI short dramas, production companies have no way to survive."

But every coin has two sides. There is an easily overlooked detail in the report by CCTV Finance: while the standardized quotation has fallen below the cost line, the custom short drama business for specific demands can still be steadily sold at 10,000-20,000 yuan per minute, and the quotation for 20-minute or so brand custom works can reach 200,000-300,000 yuan; the annual salary of compound talents who understand both AI and film and television has approached one million yuan.

Feng Shao also observed that the salary of AI directors in the industry is rising against the trend.

The two completely different pricing trends show that the market does not refuse to pay for AI content, but refuses to pay for "production without scarcity".

This also explains a common action of the two interviewees: Neither of them has locked themselves into the identity of "contract producer".

03

Where Will Short Dramas Go After the Industry Reshuffle?

Whether it is Li Juncheng or Feng Shao, the main profit of their companies does not come from short dramas, but from IP operations.

Feng Shao positions Forest Pictures as a company focusing on "long-term IP operation", and short dramas are just a stepping stone: after winning multiple awards within the National Radio and Television Administration system with a short drama about intangible cultural heritage ancient painting restoration, translating it into 8 languages and promoting it to more than 200 countries, the company has successively taken on the cultural heritage protection themed film and television project of the Supreme People's Procuratorate Film and Television Center, the cultural tourism project in Datong, Shanxi, and the next step will be projects related to Jingdezhen ceramics and the ancient villages in Songyang, Lishui, Zhejiang.

In itself, a high-quality drama with a budget of 2 million yuan can recover the cost within one or two months if it becomes a hit, and you will know the result from the data in the first month if it is not a hit.

Therefore, the real value of high-quality dramas does not lie in revenue sharing, but in awards, brand reputation and follow-up business. In a market where 10,000 views are only worth 5-10 yuan, this may be the most rational self-rescue for producers.

Li Juncheng made the transformation earlier and more thoroughly.

Wujin Wuliang still presents itself as a production studio to the outside world, but its core is a copyright company — it holds self-owned IP such as *What a Good Obedient Girl*, and its main business is copyright cooperation rather than purely taking production orders.

He also predicted something further: As the quality of AI-generated content approaches that of real people, the portrait authorization of pure new actors has lost its meaning. "Even if brokerage companies want to authorize us to use the portraits of new actors for free, we won't use them — why don't I generate a new actor by myself?"

In his view, species such as actors, gacha designers, and pure contract production companies will disappear one after another.

Certainty is emerging on both the policy side and the overseas market side.

On the policy side, the *Administrative Measures for the Development of Micro Short Dramas* has been officially implemented on September 1, and the *Regulatory Notice (Classification and Hierarchy Standards for AI Micro Short Dramas)* of the National Radio and Television Administration was launched in July, implementing hierarchical management according to investment amount.

Administrative forces are drawing boundaries for the wild growth of the industry — which is exactly paving the way for high-quality development.

On the market side, data from the China Netcasting Services Association shows that the