New War in the AI Short Drama Sector: Tencent and Kuaishou Launch a Two-pronged Surprise Attack, Who Can Break Through ByteDance's Barriers?

In October, the autumn chill is gradually setting in, but the short drama market, especially the AI short drama segment, is red-hot.

While Tencent is benchmarking against Hongguo, it launched a short drama mini-program on WeChat called "Green Bubble Short Drama" that features the "free + ad-supported" model; at the same time, it rolled out the "Fire Dragon Manhua Short Drama Challenge" with a 1 million yuan cash prize pool, paired with supporting benefits including traffic support, commercial order referrals, IP collaboration, and exclusive signing opportunities.

Meanwhile, Kuaishou Short Drama has also gone all out: it not only updated the incentive policies for high-quality dramas and series, offering a maximum single-drama incentive of 200,000 yuan, but also launched the "AI National Creation Season" to provide high-quality AIGC content with support including cash rewards, traffic backing, and joint development opportunities.

While Tencent and Kuaishou are making moves, ByteDance shows no intention of backing down at all.

Douyin Group Short Drama Copyright Center announced the upgrade of a new round of "Live-action Combined with AI Production Short Drama Incentive Campaign", which offers a maximum post-verification cash incentive bonus of 400,000 yuan, to continuously push the short drama industry into a new stage of "hybrid shooting".

With the strong players pitted against each other, a head-on confrontation is inevitable. Between Tencent and Kuaishou, who is expected to become the biggest variable that breaks the existing pattern? And with the pursuers pressing hard, how will ByteDance continue to write its short drama expansion story?

Considerations Behind the Anxiety

Monitoring data from QuestMobile shows that as of May 2026, the number of unique users of domestic short dramas in China has reached 851 million, covering nearly 70% of mobile internet users; the average monthly usage time per user is 26.9 hours, exceeding that of traditional online video platforms. DataEye Research Institute estimates that the total market size of Chinese micro short dramas, AI dramas and manhua dramas will exceed 1.21 trillion yuan in 2026.

In this huge market, the presence of Hongguo Short Drama is still expanding rapidly.

In June, the monthly active users (MAU) of Hongguo Short Drama increased by 73.7% year-on-year, leading the entire industry with a nearly 370 million MAU that is far ahead of other players; in July, its daily active users (DAU) rose 107% year-on-year to 168 million, exceeding the total DAU of the four traditional long video platforms iQiyi, Tencent Video, Youku and Mango TV (about 155 million).

As netizens put it, Hongguo Short Drama has almost become the "only legitimate heir App" on the mobile phones of domestic internet users now. Behind this, AI short dramas that have proven to be highly popular are playing an increasingly pivotal driving role.

Opening the Hongguo Short Drama App, you can intuitively see that AI short dramas have almost swept the core in-app lists including the hit drama list, hot search list, follow update list, must-watch list and favorites list, taking 18 of the top 20 spots on the hit drama list. Moreover, as of June this year, the monthly active users of Hongguo Free Manhua Drama have reached 44.28 million, ranking top 2 in the short drama video App industry.

As ByteDance's game board gets larger and larger, Tencent and Kuaishou can hardly avoid feeling anxious.

The competition between Tencent and ByteDance has long shown a multi-front trend, and Tencent did not start late in making efforts on the short drama business. Before launching Fire Dragon Manhua Drama and "Green Bubble Short Drama" this year, it has made important deployments on Tencent Video, Channels, WeChat Mini Programs and other platforms, typical examples including "Shifen Theater" that focuses on high-quality vertical-screen short dramas, and the mini-program "Mars Short Drama Club" (later renamed Mars Drama Viewing) that focuses on free vertical-screen short dramas.

Unfortunately, what seems to be multi-line parallel development is actually fragmented operations with no unified coordination. For this reason, Tencent, which got up very early, has never achieved a decisive breakthrough in the short drama track.

But Tencent can no longer afford to retreat.

According to Nomura Securities, in June this year, the user duration share of the Tencent ecosystem dropped from 31.9% last year to 29.7%, falling below 30% for the first time in the same period; the share of the ByteDance ecosystem rose from 33.3% last year to 40.1%, and also increased by 0.9 percentage points month-on-month compared with May. By August, the share of the ByteDance ecosystem further rose to 41.8%, while the share of the Tencent ecosystem continued to drop to 28.6%, and the gap between the two sides further widened.

Kuaishou certainly has considerations to maintain its traffic base, but more importantly, it is fully betting on the technical foundation of AI content production. Short dramas are not only the core verification scenario for Kuaishou's AI capabilities to land, but also an important narrative fulcrum to leverage the confidence of the capital market.

It is reported that Kling AI, the video generation large model under Kuaishou, has selected a bank to prepare for its Hong Kong initial public offering, and the listing may raise at least 1 billion US dollars. At the same time, the brand new Kling AI model Kling 4.0 has started internal testing and will be officially launched in October.

Acquaintance Socialization VS Interest Recommendation

However, compared with Kuaishou, Tencent's bargaining chips in the game are obviously much thicker.

WeChat and QQ own the unique domestic acquaintance social relationship chain, which is an asset that neither ByteDance nor Kuaishou has, and is also the core moat for Tencent to compete with ByteDance. According to Tencent's 2026 semi-annual report, during the reporting period, the combined monthly active accounts of WeChat and WeChat overseas reached 1.439 billion, and the monthly active accounts of QQ mobile terminal reached 520 million.

Relying on this strong advantage of social ecology, Tencent's short drama content can not only achieve low-cost fission to acquire users, but also is expected to break through the inherent ceiling of pure algorithm recommendation, and realize long-term traffic precipitation.

Tencent is well aware of this.

Opening "Green Bubble Short Drama", you can see that it not only deeply fits the usage habits of WeChat users in playback settings, supporting floating window playback and pure audio listening, but also specially sets up a "Friends are Watching" section on the page to guide users to see the choices of their friends, stimulate sharing and forwarding, and amplify the potential of acquaintance-based fission.

Tencent officials once disclosed that the average user duration of users watching through "Green Bubble Short Drama" is about 5 times of the overall industry level, and the user retention rate is more than 2.5 times. In response to this, its debut drama "Movie Star Yaya" also provides strong effect verification: 3 days after launch, the number of views exceeded hundreds of millions, the average per user drama watching duration on both the mini-program and Channels exceeded 30 minutes, and it gained tens of millions of users and millions of yuan in advertising revenue in the short term.

On this basis, Tencent's investment intensity also shows its firm determination.

For the dramas participating in the joint distribution model in "Green Bubble Short Drama", Tencent offers up to 100% revenue incentive, including 90% cash return and 10% advertising credit.

However, this high incentive is not easy to obtain.

In this support plan, Tencent changed the core assessment standard from the traditional industry standard of "play volume" to "average playback duration per user". If a drama wants to get 100% revenue incentive, in addition to entering the platform's joint distribution pool and passing the official qualification review for high-quality new dramas, it must also meet the hard indicator of average playback duration per user ≥ 10 minutes.

It can be seen that Tencent has focused on content quality from the very beginning of rule design. It no longer simply judges quality by traffic volume, but takes real user retention and viewing stickiness as the evaluation criteria, forcing creators to focus on polishing content and embrace the long-term value of short dramas.

Hongguo or Green Bubble

The plan sounds good, but whether it can be implemented remains to be seen.

Although Tencent has deeply embedded "Green Bubble Short Drama" into its own social ecology: it has set up a recommendation zone on the mini-program homepage, distributes highlight clips of drama plots and mounts the drama entries in Channels, and users can also directly jump to the mini-program by searching "Green Bubble Short Drama" in QQ.

However, widespread ecological entry coverage does not mean that traffic can be stably converted into effective user retention. The core of the next round of competition in the short drama track does not lie in the entry coverage density, but in whether it can build a content supply system with both stability and explosive power, and cultivate a user ecology of "high retention and high immersion".

"Green Bubble Short Drama" has set AI dramas and manhua dramas as first-level content entries from the very beginning, and even the recommendation position of AI dramas on the homepage is more forward than that of live-action dramas.

This move can certainly help "Green Bubble Short Drama" quickly enrich its content shelf at low cost, but the contradiction is also prominent: a large number of current AI short dramas generally have problems such as highly repetitive "AI faces", formulaic narratives, and deviant values. While the platform expands its volume with AI short dramas, it takes average playback duration per user as the core assessment indicator, and implements pure revenue-sharing and zero-guarantee rules for AI dramas, which will easily form an inherent contradiction between supply scale and content quality.

More critically, the strong self-production capability of Hongguo is difficult for "Green Bubble Short Drama" to replicate in a short period of time. This means that the richness of its content shelf and the initiative to produce hit dramas are more dependent on external partners, while a large number of top short drama production teams have already locked in long-term exclusive cooperation with Hongguo.

Not only that, in April this year, ByteDance integrated and upgraded the Hongguo Short Drama Creation Service Platform and Douyin Group Short Drama Copyright Center into the Short Drama Creator Center, which has completely opened up the short drama ecology of the three apps of Fanqie Novel, Hongguo and Douyin, further building a supply flywheel that mass-produces high-retention dramas.

At the same time, since the beginning of this year, ByteDance has been continuously guiding the integration of "AI + live-action" to redefine the production standards, cost structure and content form of short dramas, further taking the leading power in industry pricing and supply.

Perhaps as the general industry analysis points out, the strategic value of "Green Bubble Short Drama" for Tencent is defense rather than offense. But if Tencent wants to hold its own social traffic pool from the all-round penetration of the ByteDance ecosystem and convert it into Tencent's advertising revenue, it also needs a solid content supply foundation.

Thick bargaining chips do not equal high winning rate. As for the subsequent development, it will be verified by the market and time.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Entertainment Commercial Observation" (ID: wenyushangyeguancha), written by Short Giant, and published with authorization from 36Kr.