Green Bubble vs. Red Fruit: The second half of the short drama sector is a battle between two completely different logics.
In mid-October, "Green Bubble", the official short drama product of WeChat, was officially launched. It is operated by WeChat Short Drama Content Center, with distribution covering the WeChat search zone, the episode page of Channels, and the recommendation slots of QQ Browser. Users do not need to leave WeChat throughout the whole process from discovering episodes, watching full episodes to social sharing. Almost at the same time, "Hongguo Short Drama and Green Bubble" became a trending search topic.
This is not Tencent's first attempt at short drama. In 2021, Tencent Video launched "Theater of Excellence", taking the high-quality paid route, which was disconnected from the mass market logic of short drama. In 2025, it successively launched "Mars Drama" and the first-generation official mini-program for short dramas. The former had a limited scale and most of its content was free content converted from paid dramas, while the latter always stayed at the level of traffic access. None of the three attempts made a splash, and the crux was the same: they only acted as a channel, not a distributor.
The difference this time is that WeChat officially steps in to do joint distribution, launching the first complete product form that can directly compete against Hongguo. The "Red-Green Showdown" has thus been put on the table. But instead of rushing to judge who wins and who loses, it is better to first see clearly what cards each side holds.
01
Hongguo: The algorithm closed loop has been fully validated
The scale of Hongguo is the starting point for understanding this showdown. According to QuestMobile data, as of July 2026, the daily active users of Hongguo's independent APP reached 168 million, a year-on-year increase of 107%, exceeding the sum of daily active users of the four long video platforms Tencent Video, iQiyi, Youku and Mango TV; the average daily usage duration of users is about 125 minutes, which has surpassed the two giants of the mobile Internet, Douyin and WeChat. From launch to breaking 100 million daily active users, Hongguo only took three years, making it the fifth ByteDance application with over 100 million daily active users.
Third-party data also shows that in the ranking of monthly usage duration of top 50 domestic applications in August this year, the total duration share of ByteDance's system has reached 41.8%, while Tencent's system has dropped to 28.6% — only a year ago, the gap between the two sides was only 3.3 percentage points, but now it has widened to 13.2 percentage points. Hongguo, which has the most explosive growth, is precisely the one that has taken a large chunk of user duration from Tencent's system. This is the background for understanding the strategic weight of Green Bubble.
Supporting Hongguo's scale is a complete commercial closed loop. On the content side, more than 500,000 original IPs of Fanqie Novel form an ammunition depot, forming a positive cycle of serialized novel trial operation, reader data verification, mass adaptation of short dramas, and platform advertising monetization — in the 2026 Spring Festival season, all 37 adapted short dramas on Hongguo's platform came from Fanqie IP. On the delivery side, traffic delivery accounts for about 70% of the total cost of the short drama full link, and ByteDance's mature traffic delivery system is exactly the most powerful distribution machine in this industry. On the monetization side, the IAA model of free viewing plus advertising revenue sharing allows users to enter at zero cost, retains users through dense plot hooks and emotional reversals, and advertisers pay for exposure.
But the other side of the coin is equally obvious: user loyalty is built on algorithmic feeding, lacking additional emotional binding; in order to maintain the growth of duration, the investment in user acquisition cannot stop. The moat built by Hongguo is very deep, and the cost of defending the city is also not low.
02
Green Bubble: Gather scattered traffic in a "grand rendezvous"
Many people regard Green Bubble as Tencent building short dramas from scratch, which misjudges its basic market. QuestMobile data shows that as of May 2026, the scale of short drama mini-program users in the WeChat ecosystem has reached 508 million, a year-on-year increase of 25.4%. The problem is that these users are scattered in a large number of third-party mini-programs, lacking a unified entrance and product awareness, and the efficiency of advertising monetization can never be maximized.
What Green Bubble needs to solve is exactly this problem: access third-party content to the official content pool through joint distribution, and gather scattered users and duration with a unified product experience, distribution mechanism and commercial policy. In terms of product form, it deeply fits WeChat's habits — mini-programs do not need to be downloaded, and can be watched with one tap. Third-party data shows that users over 40 years old account for more than 50% of Hongguo's users, and users in tier-3 and lower cities account for more than 55%. For this core audience of short dramas, mini-programs that do not require downloading obviously have lower thresholds than independent APPs. In terms of interaction, Green Bubble follows the Channels system, supporting likes, comments, and reposting to group chats. When watching dramas and receiving messages, you can use floating window playback to adapt to WeChat's usage scenario of staying in the background all day.
In order to attract content partners, WeChat has spared no expense this time: from October 16 to December 31, high-quality new dramas that are connected to joint distribution, launched within 7 days and meet the standard of per capita playback duration can enjoy 100% revenue incentive for 7 consecutive days, and the platform fully bears the bandwidth, review and operation and maintenance costs. It is worth noting that WeChat replaced the industry's common playback volume assessment with per capita playback duration — actively blocking the shortcut of brushing playback volumes, which means declaring from the very beginning that the competition dimension is not about drainage efficiency, but about user retention. Gray scale data shows that this logic has achieved initial results: the per capita viewing duration of Green Bubble users is about 5 times the industry average, and the retention rate is more than 2.5 times; the AI short drama *Starlet Yaya* has exceeded 100 million views 3 days after its launch, reaching more than 10 million users on both ends.
03
Game between two distribution logics
Looking deeper, Hongguo and Green Bubble represent two completely different content distribution logics.
The underlying logic of Hongguo is algorithm-driven. The recommendation algorithm accurately captures preferences, high-density reversals create instant pleasure points, supplemented by game-like incentive systems such as sign-in, completing tasks, and redeeming gold coins for cash, to firmly retain users on the platform. Some netizens joked that "parents spend three hours a day scrolling Hongguo, but the gold coins are not enough to redeem even 10 cents". Strong immersion and dense pleasure points are the reasons why it achieves a per capita duration of 125 minutes.
The underlying logic of Green Bubble is social-driven. "Friends are watching" makes vague recommendations based on friends' viewing records. A drama you come across may have just been watched by your colleagues and friends — acquaintance-based recommendation has low customer acquisition cost and high conversion efficiency, and group chat reposting has far greater penetration in the sinking market than feed stream ads. But the social attribute also brings restrictions: the richness of recommended content is less than that of pure algorithms, and watching dramas will be interrupted by messages and Moments, so the immersion is naturally not as good as independent APPs. In response to external concerns about social pressure, people close to the WeChat team said that recommendations are only processed in a vague way, only showing the number of viewers or likes, without exposing the specific identities of friends, following the distinction between private likes and public likes in Channels.
At least at this stage, neither side intends to fight head-on on the other's battlefield. Hongguo occupies the immersive update-watching duration of users, while Green Bubble competes for the fragmented time of "watching one episode conveniently" in the WeChat scenario. According to Huxiu's understanding, the Green Bubble team currently has only about 10 people, with the core goal of polishing product experience and introducing high-quality content, and has not set aggressive daily active user or revenue KPIs — WeChat's goal is not to beat Hongguo, but to fight a necessary defensive battle.
04
The real variable: content producers and e-commerce entrance
The most direct impact brought by Green Bubble's entry is the reconstruction of the pattern of the content supply side. DataEye Research Institute estimates that the market size of micro short dramas will exceed 1.21 trillion yuan in 2026, of which free short dramas account for about 573 billion yuan. In this market, the distribution discourse power has long been held by Hongguo: top production teams can still make profits through scale effect, while small and medium teams are generally trapped by high traffic delivery costs and low revenue sharing, without much negotiating chips. Now with another generous buyer, simultaneous launch on two platforms may become the norm in the industry — content producers are the first batch of beneficiaries of this showdown.
Of course, Hongguo's content barrier will not collapse overnight. The long-term contracts of top production companies and the internal closed loop of Fanqie IP from adaptation to distribution are all assets accumulated over three years. The corresponding card in Tencent's hand is China Literature: in March 2025, China Literature opened more than 2000 web novel IPs for the whole industry to adapt into short dramas. In the first half of this year, China Literature's short drama and manhua drama business revenue was 430 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 230%, more than 660 manhua dramas exceeded 10 million views, of which 107 exceeded 100 million views.
Hou Xiaonan, CEO of China Literature, also revealed that the OPC (One Person Company) model where "one creator plus IP and AI tools can complete the whole process of manhua drama" is on the rise. China Literature has signed more than 5000 individuals and studios, and the top ten OPC creators all have an annual income of over one million yuan. Overseas is also an incremental market: China Literature's overseas manhua drama platform ToonScroll has 3 works with over 100 million views, and it is expected that the overseas AI manhua drama market size will exceed 4 billion US dollars in 2026.
Another variable that neither side can avoid is AI. In the first half of 2026, 221,900 new AI short dramas and manhua dramas were launched across the network, while there were only 20,800 real-person micro short dramas — the supply of AI dramas is more than ten times that of real-person dramas. 7 of the top 10 works on Green Bubble's home page list are AI-related content. The crushing advantage of AI production capacity in efficiency and cost is quickly filling the content gap of the new platform.
Looking deeper, what both companies are targeting is not just advertising fees. When users spend more than two hours a day scrolling short dramas, the commercial value of this scenario will never stop at advertising. Hongguo has tested the "search for the same style" and mall entrance on the playback page. When users see clothing and home furnishings in the drama, they can directly jump to the Douyin brand flagship store to place an order. It is worth noting that short drama e-commerce follows a completely different logic from live streaming e-commerce: live streaming relies on the host's trust endorsement and wins in immediate transaction; short dramas naturally integrate goods into life scenarios through plots and characters, and users generate consumption willingness due to identifying with the roles, resulting in deeper recommendation effect and longer life cycle.
In terms of path, ByteDance expands the scale of short dramas and then accesses e-commerce, reusing Douyin's mature supply chain and algorithms; Tencent integrates short dramas into the WeChat ecosystem, and uses the system to undertake transactions. After watching the drama, users can directly flow into the mini-program mall and Channels live room, and complete the closed loop relying on WeChat Pay. The directions are opposite, but the purpose is the same: short drama is evolving from a content category to an entrance connecting content and transactions. Of course, short drama e-commerce is still in its very early stage — brand budgets are highly concentrated on top works, more than 80% of the budget is invested in short dramas with over 500 million views. Visual categories such as clothing and jewelry have acceptable conversion performance, while food and home appliances are still in the growth stage.
Epilogue
It is too early to conclude that Green Bubble can directly shake Hongguo — deep entrance and lack of exclusive top content are all practical shortcomings. Similarly, the idea that Hongguo can sit back and relax also underestimates the mobilization capability of WeChat, the super entrance.
A more likely picture is that algorithm efficiency and social relations each have irreplaceable moats, and both sides continue to grow bigger on their respective battlefields, making the short drama industry evolve from a monopoly to a duopoly competition. And competition itself will force the industry to bid farewell to the extensive traffic competition and subsidy war, and turn to in-depth game of content quality, user experience and ecological collaboration. For content producers and audiences, this is already a good outcome.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Bowang Finance", written by Bi Shan, and published with authorization by 36Kr.