Tencent is pursuing Hongguo, with WeChat, the "green bubble", leading the charge.

WeChat, which is busy building small and micro Agents, has been drawn into another battle.

Recently, WeChat launched the short drama mini-program "Green Bubble Short Drama", with the promotional slogan "Free high-quality dramas, one tap to watch", targeting Hongguo Short Drama under ByteDance. Users can watch micro short dramas for free within WeChat without downloading a standalone app.

This move of WeChat to lay out the short drama business is exactly the same as the launch of Channels six years ago. At that time, Tencent's short video products such as Weishi, Shanka, and Penguin KanKan failed one after another. WeChat stepped forward and relied on its huge traffic base to help Tencent get a ticket to the short video track.

In recent years, in order to gain a firm foothold in the short drama track, Tencent has successively launched products such as Very Theater and Mars Drama, all of which have received lukewarm responses. The launch of Green Bubble Short Drama undoubtedly carries Tencent's ambition to rely on WeChat to get a share of the emerging track once again.

Free of charge, low threshold, coupled with WeChat's national-level traffic pool, Tencent seems to hold a good hand of cards. But what it faces is an opponent like Hongguo that has already established user scale and production closed loop. WeChat can provide Tencent with a more accessible entry for short dramas, but whether it can spawn an irreplaceable short drama platform remains unknown.

Fierce Hongguo, ByteDance erodes Tencent's user time

Even to this day, WeChat is still the app with the highest monthly active users in China, but with the disappearance of traffic dividends, the competition logic of China's mobile Internet industry has quietly changed — from acquiring incremental traffic to seizing stock user time.

Source: Nomura Securities

In the battle for user time, relying on stronger content advantages and user stickiness, ByteDance has surpassed Tencent. According to the research report disclosed by Nomura Securities, in August 2026, among the top 50 apps in China in terms of user usage duration, ByteDance's app duration share reached 41.8%, while Tencent's was only 28.6%.

A year ago, the usage time shares of ByteDance and Tencent were 34.2% and 30.9% respectively, with a gap of only 3.3 percentage points. In just one year, the gap has expanded to 13.2 percentage points, four times that of a year ago.

Hongguo Short Drama is one of the important driving forces for the rise of ByteDance's app duration share. In August 2026, the usage duration of this app skyrocketed 182% year-on-year, and its share jumped from 2.2% to 5.9%, ranking fourth across the entire network. Among the four apps with the longest user usage time in China, ByteDance occupies three seats, namely Douyin, Douyin Speed Edition and Hongguo Short Drama.

It is reported that Hongguo Short Drama was launched in May 2023, with the core operation strategy of "watching short dramas for free", inheriting Douyin's advantages in algorithm recommendation, and creating a strong sense of conflict through fast-paced episodes, so it has stronger attractiveness.

Due to the ceiling of a single user's usage time, the competition for attention between platforms has become more intense. Even if the total usage time across the network is still growing, the rapid expansion of products such as Hongguo Short Drama will increase the pressure on other platforms to maintain their duration share.

Source: Nomura Securities

Data disclosed by Nomura Securities shows that in August 2026, among the four apps with the longest user usage time in China, Tencent only occupies one seat with WeChat, whose usage duration share is 18.3%, down 1 percentage point year-on-year, ranking second.

Obviously, if it wants to seize more user attention, Tencent needs to launch a product that can rival Hongguo Short Drama as soon as possible.

After Channels, WeChat acts as the "key player" again

Tencent chose to launch Green Bubble Short Drama within WeChat, which can not only make use of existing users and distribution channels, but also remind people of the growth path of Channels relying on the WeChat ecosystem.

When Channels was launched in January 2020, the short video industry had entered an oligarch era dominated by Douyin and Kuaishou. However, relying on WeChat's billion-level user base, Channels broke through a bloody path and became one of the three giants of the short video industry.

According to Tencent's financial report, in the second quarter of 2026, thanks to the increasingly rich content for young users, upgraded interactive functions and the implementation of a new multi-dimensional content mixed arrangement system, the total user usage duration of Channels increased by more than 20% year-on-year.

Nowadays, with the gradual maturity of short drama content, a large number of users on the WeChat platform have embraced short drama mini-programs.

Source: QuestMobile

Data disclosed by QuestMobile shows that in May 2026, the number of unique users in the short drama industry was 851 million, of which the user scales of short drama apps, short drama WeChat mini-programs, and short drama Douyin mini-programs were 402 million, 508 million, and 14 million respectively, with year-on-year growth of 77.1%, 25.4%, and a year-on-year decrease of 83.3%.

A horizontal comparison makes it easy to find that although apps represented by Hongguo Short Drama have stronger growth potential, relying on WeChat's huge traffic pool, the user scale of the WeChat short drama mini-program channel is larger than that of the standalone short drama app channel. This is also an important basis for Tencent to launch the Green Bubble Short Drama mini-program.

Source: WeChat

In order to give full play to the advantages of WeChat's social relationship chain, Green Bubble Short Drama does not simply adopt the distribution logic of algorithm recommendation, but sets up a recommendation section "Friends are watching" on the homepage, as well as a regional popular list "Friends in a certain area are all watching". Users can also share their favorite short drama content directly with WeChat friends.

The social relationship chain is expected to help Green Bubble Short Drama achieve cold start. However, friend recommendation solves the problem of how to find a drama, and the motivation to watch continuously comes more from the plot itself. After a drama ends, whether the content supply is sufficient and the recommendation is accurate will affect whether users are willing to actively open Green Bubble Short Drama again.

The next round of competition for AI short dramas extends to the production end

Hongguo Short Drama takes the lead, which not only comes from the formed user scale and consumption habits, but also benefits from ByteDance's full-link layout around IP, production tools and distribution channels.

Although the production cost of most short dramas is lower than that of traditional long dramas, there are still thresholds for continuous narration, character shaping and audio-visual production. Even with the introduction of AI, high-quality content still requires investment in script, production and post-production resources.

According to the calculation of DataEye Research Institute, the average production cost of a high-quality paid live-action short drama is about 1.5 million yuan. Although the cost of vertical screen information flow AI quasi-live-action short drama has dropped significantly, it is still around 200,000 yuan. Nomura Securities pointed out in the research report that the cost of IP or script in high-quality AI short dramas accounts for about 30% of the total production cost, and computing power and production account for more than 20%.

In order to reduce the difficulty of creation, expand content supply and improve content quality, over the past few years, ByteDance has been committed to connecting the short drama ecosystems of the three apps of Fanqie Novel, Hongguo and Douyin, building a supply flywheel for mass incubation of short dramas.

Source: <2025 Online Literature IP Transformation Report>

The 2025 Online Literature IP Transformation Report shows that there were 664 annual high-quality hit short dramas across the network in 2025. Among them, there were 413 hit short dramas adapted from Fanqie Novel IP, accounting for 62%.

In addition to providing high-quality IP copyrights, ByteDance is also committed to reducing the production threshold of short dramas through the AI video generation model Seedance. In July 2026, ByteDance launched Seedance 2.5, which can generate 30-second high-quality video clips at a single time and has the local editing ability to maintain picture consistency.

Source: ByteDance

According to Nomura Securities' estimate, at the current stage, Seedance is applied to 80% to 90% of the production process of AI short dramas, and has become an important infrastructure in the short drama industry.

As a mobile Internet giant, Tencent also has a full-link closed-loop ecosystem — China Literature and Tencent Animation hold a large number of well-known IPs; Tencent Pictures and Penguin Pictures have video production capabilities; platforms such as WeChat, Tencent Video and QQ can provide distribution channels.

However, whether these resources can form effective synergy with Green Bubble Short Drama remains to be tested. Judging from the current public actions, WeChat's main focus is to attract more content parties to participate by increasing revenue sharing and providing traffic incentives.

In September 2026, WeChat Open Platform launched the Q4 micro short drama mini-program incentive activity, providing tiered incentives for eligible dramas participating in Green Bubble co-distribution, and high-quality new dramas can enjoy up to 100% revenue incentive, including 90% cash sharing and 10% advertising credit matching.

For Green Bubble, phased incentives can attract dramas to settle in, but how to further form a continuous supply of high-quality content is the real question Tencent needs to answer.

From Channels to Green Bubble, Tencent is betting on WeChat again. Behind this is the same problem: users are still in its own ecosystem, but the new entertainment time flows more to ByteDance. Therefore, the short drama war is not only to supplement a content category, but also Tencent's counterattack against the decline of attention share.

But it is still questionable whether the path of Channels can be replicated by Green Bubble Short Drama. Hongguo has accumulated user habits, and AI is changing content supply. When the production threshold drops and the number of dramas becomes more abundant, the focus of industry competition will also shift. Platforms need to continuously find and amplify content that users are willing to watch at a lower overall cost. Traffic entry and high revenue sharing can only solve part of the problem.

Tencent has WeChat, IP and production resources, but complete resources do not mean effective synergy. If Green Bubble Short Drama mainly takes over existing dramas, Tencent is still fighting for the share of the distribution link. Whether it can further participate in the continuous production of high-quality content really determines whether Tencent can narrow the gap with ByteDance.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Farsight", written by the Farsight team, and authorized for release by 36Kr.