Who’s Profiting Off China’s Ultrashort Drama Boom?
In the 2025 Oscar Best Picture winner “Anora,” a destitute sex worker seeks to escape her straitened circumstances by marrying into wealth, only to see her dreams crumble — an inversion of the classic Cinderella trope that mirrored filmgoers’ disillusionment with the American dream.
But what if you remade “Anora” as a Chinese ultrashort drama? Much of the plot could be reused wholesale, but the ending would almost certainly change: Instead of being left heartbroken, Anora would reveal herself to be a secret billionaire or a powerful CEO and use her influence to crush her fiancé and his family.
That may sound trite, but these power fantasies have become big business in China and around the world. Shot for vertical screens and broken into dozens of swipe-friendly episodes lasting between one and two minutes, ultrashort dramas offer viewers a constant stream of exciting twists, in which humble cleaning ladies turn out to be CEOs, or divorced heroines inherit billions that they use to exact revenge on their exes.
The overall market for ultrashort dramas in China reached 50.4 billion yuan ($6.9 billion) in 2024, eclipsing the 42.5 billion yuan taken in by the Chinese box office last year — a reversal that underscores “Anora” director Sean Baker’s Oscars lament about the collapse of the traditional film industry.
Much of this money comes from diehard fans. While some episodes can be watched for free, viewers pay roughly 14 cents an episode to keep up with their favorite shows, meaning the cost of watching a full season can be as high as a monthly Netflix subscription.
That’s an eye-catching number, but a business’s profitability ultimately hinges on its cost structure. And that’s where the quickie drama business model comes up short.
Take the hugely popular ultrashort drama “Wushuang,” for example. The show — a male power fantasy — became a hot topic within the industry after its August 2023 premiere, in large part due to reports that it had broken the 100-million-yuan revenue barrier. But this figure doesn’t tell the whole story: In the ultrashort business, the vast majority of a show’s earnings are plowed right back into user acquisition (UA), a performance-based advertising model that originated in mobile gaming and involves purchasing user traffic through in-feed ads on media platforms like Douyin, the version of TikTok available on the Chinese mainland.
The purpose of UA is similar to that of film promotion: attracting audiences to watch a given piece of content. However, while promotional costs in the Chinese film industry typically account for 5% to 15% of a film’s projected gross, UA can be as high as 80% to 94% of an ultrashort’s total earnings, leaving less than 20% for production companies as profit. In the case of “Wushuang,” the show’s producers have said the show cost less than 500,000 yuan to make, but at least 80 million yuan to market.
Now consider that the 20% profit figure is the best-case scenario, and this money needs to cover all the costs of content production and administration. Often, production companies earn as little as 3% in profit from a hit show. This suggests that short dramas are better compared to a modestly profitable internet product than the highly lucrative Hollywood model.
In other words, the real winners of the ultrashort boom have been the platforms, not the producers. This is particularly true of Douyin, the biggest and most important of the short video apps.
Compounding the issue is the widespread practice of content piracy. ByteDance, which owns Douyin, eventually decided that piracy prevention wasn’t worth the time and money. Instead, the company adopted an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach and launched a “free” ultrashort platform known as Hongguo.
The app was a success, reaching 120 million monthly active users within its first year of operation — an audience that ByteDance can monetize through in-app advertising, rather than subscriptions.
But the success of Hongguo has only further marginalized competing ultrashort production firms. Top ultrashort companies like Jiuzhou and Dianzhong have built their own distribution platforms, which they now fill with content made by outside production teams, but they struggle to compete with ByteDance’s traffic hose.
That’s left them with a stark choice: either upgrade their content or cut their costs. Some are starting to experiment with AI, while others are going all in on anime in hopes of expanding their appeal to younger audiences. It remains to be seen whether they can carve out a new niche in the market, or if their already thin profits will disappear entirely.
Editor: Wu Haiyun.
(Header image: A behind-the-scenes shot of an ultrashort drama shoot in Zhengzhou, Henan province, 2023. VCG)
