Li Na has siphoned off part of Hongguo's traffic.
At a time when Hongguo AI short dramas are swallowing massive traffic, Li Na and her "love-hate" partner Xu Fei have shot to fame. Real-person content has managed to snatch back a sliver of public attention from among countless AI-generated faces.
In recent years, both live-action films and TV dramas have been permeated with a sluggish vibe. AI dramas boast low production costs and high chances of going viral. Though they are not necessarily highly profitable, they are far less costly to lose money on than live-action productions, to the point that even some film directors are exploring the transition to making AI dramas.
Li Na's success this time proves that genuine human emotions still hold the power to make a breakthrough on their own. The complex emotional threads of primates are the last solid fortress that all human creators rely on. Yet the story between her and Xu Fei, a "once-in-a-century" encounter, still requires extremely high costs to come by. She cannot reverse the trend of AI short dramas sweeping across everything, but she has injected a much-needed breath of life into the sluggish live-action content industry.
Standing Out Through Authenticity
"I'm just an objective recorder."
This is a line said by Zhao Wenhai, the director of Friendship After the Deadline, in an interview with Guancha.cn.
In the conventional playbook of creating hit variety shows, Friendship After the Deadline clearly lacks all the conventional traffic-drawing elements. To put it bluntly, all the people appearing on the show are "has-been marginal celebrities" in the industry, yet it has successfully gone viral, all thanks to the simple truth — down-to-earth authenticity.
Imagine if the director had followed netizens' suggestions and invited a certain Yang and a certain Tang to "confront each other" on the spot, the 20-year entanglement between the two marginal celebrities would most likely have escalated into a corporate battle, a lofty game of resource competition. Once a sense of distance is created, the audience's sense of immersion vanishes.
But Li Na and Xu Fei are different. They were contestants on the 2006 Super Girl talent show, were once hugely popular, then faded into obscurity, so much so that they can even bring up the old grudge "you snitched on me back then and caused me financial losses" to argue openly in a friendship variety show.
Not fighting over men, not over billing order, but over money, just like every one of us who grinds through work for that meager salary raise and promotion. The audience does not need any emotional translation to put themselves in their shoes and understand this kind of plain betrayal.
This kind of "real script" drawn from real life is far more sophisticated than the gimmick of a group of wealthy celebrities in Divas Hit the Road Season 2 pretending to travel on a budget in Europe and bickering with each other, as it is tied to the fundamental truth of "I need a job, I need to put food on the table".
On top of the tangled interests, the ambiguous packaging of this kind of "female friendship" that makes you "confine yourself to a limited space for the other person" once made people think there was even a hidden subplot.
The runaway success of Friendship After the Deadline once again proves that "traffic" does not come from "traffic stars", but from "stories of the real world". This one-of-a-kind trait comes with inherent traffic penetration, which is the hard core thematic strength that AI dramas, which keep copying stories over and over, can hardly possess.
The Ebb and Flow
Friendship After the Deadline has swept away the sluggish "variety show winter low" of the past two years, taking up over 70% of the market share on the new variety show popularity ranking. The total views of its first 4 episodes have exceeded 600 million times.
This result has excited all variety show practitioners. After all, the prosperous era of variety shows from 2012 to 2016 is far behind the public. On today's screens, we can no longer see hit variety shows with cross-circle penetration such as Dad, Where Are We Going?, I Am a Singer and Keep Running, and what is left is only shrinking sponsorship, sluggish popularity, and repetitive old installments of long-running variety shows.
However, when Friendship After the Deadline went viral, Hongguo AI short dramas were also advancing at a blistering pace. This is not the conventional "peer rivalry" seen in previous years, but a type of "competition from a different dimension". After the debate between the vice president of Douyin and veteran media practitioners, the whole nation has noticed Hongguo's "aggressive development momentum": its monthly active users exceed 430 million, and each user spends an average of over 160 minutes on Hongguo every day.
Some people say that comparing Friendship After the Deadline with Hongguo is comparing two completely different products: one is a short drama platform, the other is a variety show; one is AI-generated, the other is live-action, so they may not be comparable.
The products do seem completely unrelated at first glance, but the total time audiences can spend is limited. Under the scope of "attention economics", "your gain is my loss", and there is a certain substitution relationship between the two.
For example, in the fiercely competitive long and short video sector, industry data shows that Hongguo's daily active users have reached 168 million, exceeding the total 155 million daily active users of the four major long video platforms iQiyi, Tencent Video, Youku and Mango TV. All of these platforms have long claimed that they want to develop short dramas, but none of them have succeeded. The short drama project on Tencent's WeChat Channels was once highly anticipated, but it also failed to deliver, leaving Hongguo far ahead of all competitors.
As for the already struggling film market, Hongguo cannot be said to be the direct cause of the consecutive slumps in box office returns, but it is still an important contributing factor. After all, high-quality short dramas are far more cost-effective than spending 40 yuan to watch a low-quality bad movie.
At a time when Hengdian World Studios has turned into an empty city and even mainstream film actors have no roles to take, the small variety show boom sparked by Li Na and Xu Fei seems to bring a glimmer of hope to all frontline creators who are still willing to listen to real people's stories.
This hope is not a signal of "live-action content fighting back", but an anchor point: outside the territory enclosed by Hongguo's computing power, there is still a small piece of land that algorithms cannot calculate.
The existence of this piece of land in itself serves as a reminder for all those who rush to make AI dramas in a swarm.
AI dramas have advantages in production capacity and cost, but they have an unavoidable shortcoming: they can create a surreal otherworldly vibe, but cannot show the traces of a person who has truly lived a real life.
Hongguo can release tens of thousands of AI dramas in a single month, but it cannot create an afternoon where two people "confine themselves to a limited space for each other". The value of live-action content never lies in being more productive or faster than AI, but in occasionally providing something that AI can only imitate but never possess: the clumsiness, dullness, and unresolved old scores that belong specifically to a certain person on a certain day.
It thrives on scarcity, but also suffers from being "once-in-a-century" and one of a kind.
But this very "one of a kind" trait is exactly the reason why it will not be replaced by AI, and why live-action content is worth continuing to produce.
It is just that the production of live-action content will definitely become increasingly difficult.
Commercial Victory and Defeat
Li Na has already embarked on the path of commercial monetization this week. On November 5th, Juewei Duck Neck officially announced her as its "Fresh Promotion Ambassador", and on November 6th, Nayuki's Tea announced her as its "Warm Freshly Baked Series Recommendation Ambassador", completing two brand collaborations within two days.
Netizens all sent their blessings: "She has earned back her previous financial losses." Everyone feels a strong sense of immersion: The comeback of a "has-been marginal celebrity" is just like winning a small lottery prize in one's own life.
However, both live-action content platforms and AI short drama platforms make profits through monetization, but their logics are fundamentally different, even harshly different.
Li Na's monetization path is short, fast and highly dependent on timing, which is essentially a short-term commercial flash campaign: Brands are not buying Li Na's long-term endorsement value, but the emotional concentration and topic relevance she has in these one or two weeks.
For Mango Super Media, its stock price has risen by 56.19% cumulatively since November, and once hit the 10% daily limit during this period. This increase reflects the capital market's expectation of "hit variety shows driving sponsorship and membership growth", rather than the already realized financial data.
A background worth noting is that Mango Super Media's net profit in the third quarter of 2026 plummeted by 95.42% year on year, and its attributable net profit for the first three quarters dropped by 79.01% year on year. The popularity of a single variety show can repair market sentiment in the short term, but cannot fill in the long-standing industry bug of sluggish long-form video membership growth.
Hongguo's monetization path is fundamentally different from the two mentioned above. It does not make money from a single drama or a single celebrity, but by controlling the traffic exit to sell exposure to advertisers and buy content duration from content producers.
According to institutional estimates, Hongguo's core revenue in the first half of 2026 is about 20 billion yuan, 97% of which comes from advertising, with a year-on-year growth of about 87%. AI short dramas contributed about 2.8 billion yuan to this revenue, with a growth rate of nearly 400%, but its scale is only about one sixth of that of live-action short dramas (16.5 billion yuan). This shows that AI short dramas are currently an increment in Hongguo's overall advertising revenue, not the main pillar.
Comparing the three monetization paths, we can draw a conclusion:
For live-action creators and platforms that focus on live-action content, their profit path is a type of ecological leverage: using a low-cost variety show to drive stock price growth, sponsorship expectations and brand spillover effects, but the fulcrum of this leverage (such as membership growth) is not stable.
Li Na earns profits from the emotional window: during the days when her popularity is at its peak, she converts topic concentration into short-term commercial contracts, and once the window closes, her income stops growing.
Only Hongguo, riding on the trend of AI content, earns the power to set rules that bring money faster. It does not bet on whether a single drama will go viral, but bets that users will stay on its platform. Dramas can be replaced, content producers can be replaced, as long as it holds the traffic exit in its hand, it can keep selling advertising slots.
This is essentially a replica of the logic of Toutiao and Douyin in the early years. ByteDance has been making products of this kind of traffic entrance from the very beginning.
So what can ordinary people take away from Li Na's recent boom?
In our opinion, it is definitely not to copy her path, but the reason why she is remembered. She became popular not because she is more entertaining than AI, but because she has something that AI does not have: the real predicaments and small miracles of a real human being.
This thing may not make us rich, but it ensures that we still retain our "human touch".
At a time when AI is running rampant, every ordinary of us making content, running a small business, or even posting a Moments update, can take away this point: do not compete with computing power for production capacity, find the unique specificity that only you have and no one else can copy. It is tiny, but it is real.
It is that helpless, that simple, and that worth being content with.
This article is from the WeChat public account "Muhe Business and Finance", author: Gong Zheng, editor: Yang Jing, published with authorization from 36Kr.