Recently, the sky has fallen for the literary and artsy crowd.
Because Jia Zhangke posted on Weibo that he was watching Hongguo, and he binge-watched over a hundred of them in one go, and he even deliberately started with the most rustic ones.
This group collectively had a massive breakdown, saying: what about the promised great director of art films?
But guess what, Hongguo doesn't cave under pressure—it turned around and invited Director Jia to be its spokesperson.
No matter how niche, how artsy, how different you are, can you resist watching Hongguo videos?
It's said that we've now entered an era of Hongguo for all, and this claim is not unfounded.
QuestMobile just released a set of data: as of July this year, Hongguo's daily active users reached 168 million, more than doubling in a year.
Just hearing that might not give you a clear idea.
Put it this way: Tencent Video has 50 million daily active users, iQIYI 45 million, Youku and Mango around 30 million each, and the four combined total 155 million.
Hongguo, as a single app, is grinding the four big brothers into the ground.
The most stinging part isn't the number of users, but the time spent: an average of 125 minutes per person per day, longer than binge-watching two TV dramas.
On the side of iQIYI, Youku, Tencent, and Mango, monthly time spent has dropped by 24% to 47% over the past year, with Youku nearly halved.
Actually, since this year's Spring Festival, Fox Sister has felt that something was a bit off.
During the Spring Festival period in cinemas, the daily average box office fell below 1 billion for the first time in six years. But at the same time, Hongguo's on-platform views reached 33.6 billion, with 1.28 billion person-times following dramas—this contrast left people stunned.
So what exactly is Hongguo's secret?
Many people's first reaction is: it's free.
Exactly, being free is the biggest killer weapon. Looking back at the long-video side, membership prices have risen three times in five years, from a monthly fee of 15 yuan to 45 for the Star Diamond tier, and screen casting requires an even higher-tier membership.
You spend increasingly more money while getting fewer and fewer rights, and users have slammed them onto the trending searches several times.
Some say Hongguo is stealing users from long video platforms.
Fox Sister thinks that's not entirely right. To be precise, Hongguo has turned a portion of people who didn't watch dramas into viewers.
For example, our parents.
Data shows that over half of Hongguo's users are over 45 years old. There are over 40 million silver-haired users over 50, meaning one in every seven Hongguo users is an elderly person, and each watches two hours a day.
These people were never long-video users to begin with; they weren't willing to spend money on content, but they had plenty of time.
With Hongguo, grandpas and grandmas finally found free entertainment. By the way, they can cash out three or five yuan, enough to buy a bunch of greens.
There's also the fact that it's good to have a big tree to lean on for shade—ByteDance has the entire pipeline in its grip.
Fanqie Novel produces web novel IPs—rebirth, counterattack, fantasy, farming, there's every genre imaginable. The plots that traditional film and television don't dare to shoot or can't shoot have long been shot to death here.
Long dramas can't put out more than a few quality new releases a month, and the genres just keep going back and forth over the same few. Hongguo launches dozens of new dramas every day.
Plus its unique algorithm recommendations—no need to think about what to watch, it plays as soon as you open it, swipe if you don't like it, there's always a next one.
Think about it—Douyin is responsible for pouring people into the pool, users see a clip on Douyin and jump with one click, Fanqie outputs the IP, Hongguo is responsible for playing it, and all three links are closed-loop within ByteDance.
It's equivalent to others still growing vegetables, while ByteDance directly opened a fully automated cafeteria.
Finally, there's another important reason accelerating Hongguo's explosion, and that's the development of AI.
In the past, shooting short dramas required going to Hengdian, renting locations, and hiring actors. Now with AI short dramas, a few people typing prompts on a computer gets it done, costing only one-tenth of live-action dramas, and producing one in two to three weeks.
Costs have fallen to the floor, so production capacity naturally explodes. In the first quarter of this year, the entire industry launched about 128,000 micro short dramas, with AI micro short dramas accounting for over 95%.
Quite a few live-action crews in Hengdian have already stopped work.
On one side, live-action actors are complaining about unemployment; on the other side, AI actors are getting so many gigs their hands are full.
The short drama "The Girl Who Got Laid Off" made its female lead Fang Taozi famous—she not only got commercials but even landed on a magazine cover.
Even more surreal is that celebrities have already started lining up to "sell their faces."
Wang Zuxian, who retired from acting 22 years ago, licensed her peak-era image to a game company.
She didn't shoot a single frame herself, yet the AI-generated short film "Qianying" came out—Nie Xiaoqian looking back while holding an umbrella, and the comment section was flooded with tears.
Wu Qihua also licensed his 20-year-old face to an AI film company, and while getting his fee, he also got to relive the feeling of being a leading man.
Actress Qi Wei starred in an AI zombie short film. Although it was criticized as slightly stiff, this trend definitely can't be stopped.
Look at long dramas next door—they're still playing the old formula of "big IP plus traffic stars."
Cutting scripts to accommodate actors' schedules, pandering to fans by wildly altering plots, and in the end the logic is a mess. Of the dozen or so long dramas that aired this summer, not a single one was any good.
The content isn't good, yet the charging keeps coming in new tricks—VIP and SVIP still have to pay more to watch the last few episodes. Netizens call this matryoshka-style charging.
Of course, Hongguo is not without its weaknesses.
The biggest problem is that while the industry looks lively, the money hasn't gone into creators' pockets.
Some reports say Hongguo earned 15 billion yuan in 2025. ByteDance denied the data was inaccurate, but people in the know say it was only more, not less.
Either way, it's basically a consensus that 90% of those making short dramas lose money. Some people report that revenue per ten thousand views has dropped from a hundred yuan to 5 to 10 yuan.
Moreover, production capacity is already severely oversupplied. In the first half of the year alone, more than 220,000 new AI short dramas were launched natively on Douyin.
At 100 minutes each, a person would have to watch without sleep or rest for 42 years to get through them all once.
Among them, only 1,055 had over 100 million views, a hit rate of 0.47%. In plain terms, the vast majority of dramas are just also-rans once they go online.
If only the platform is making money, is that really reasonable? Without a win-win business model, how far can it really go?
Finally, Hu Mei never thought that short dramas beating long dramas would make everyone happy.
If the screen is full of AI faces, and watching three dramas you run into five identical ones, with plots all copy-pasted, that's another kind of disaster.
But long dramas really didn't lose unfairly. Audiences have never been that hard to please. If screenwriters write good scripts and actors hone their acting skills, there's no need to worry about no one paying.
Perhaps what has always defeated long dramas is not short dramas, but arrogance.
How long Hongguo can stay popular is a question we still can't answer for now.
But you can say in the comments: do you still remember the last time you watched a long drama completely, without fast-forwarding?
Editor: chacha
This article comes from the WeChat public account "Tech Fox" (ID: kejihutv), author: Hu Mei
