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China’s $5 billion micro drama industry is booming
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Bytedance and rival Kuaishou among successful first movers
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Chinese companies creating short videos for US customers
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Micro dramas often feature revenge or rags to riches stories
by Antoni Slodkowski
ZHENGZHOU, China, Sept 21 — On a film set that looks like the medieval palace of a Chinese king, Zhu Jian is busy making a splash in the world’s second-largest film industry.
The 69-year-old actor plays the head of a wealthy family who is throwing a lavish banquet on his birthday. But neither of them knows that the maid in the scene is his real granddaughter.
Second twist: Zhu is not filming for the cinema screen.
“Grandma’s Moon” is a micro-drama, with vertically filmed, minute-long episodes that feature constant plot twists, designed to keep millions of viewers glued to their mobile phone screens — and they’ll pay more for it, too.
“They don’t go to the movies anymore,” Zhu said of his audience, who he said are mostly middle-aged workers and pensioners. “It’s very convenient to hold a mobile phone and watch anything you want whenever you want.”
China’s $5 billion-a-year microdrama industry is booming, according to interviews by Reuters with 10 people in the sector as well as four scholars and media analysts.
Some experts say short-format videos are becoming a powerful competitor to China’s film industry, which is second only to Hollywood in size and dominated by the state-owned China Film Group. And the trend is already spreading to the United States, a rare example of the allure of Chinese cultural exports in the West.
According to analytics company AppFigures, three major China-backed micro-drama apps were downloaded 30 million times on both Apple’s App Store and Google Play in the first quarter of 2024, generating $71 million in international revenue.
“Viewers only have so much attention span. So obviously the more time they spend on short videos, the less time they have for TV or other long-format shows,” said Ashley Dudrenok, founder of a Hong Kong-based marketing consultancy.
The leader in this space is Kuaishou, an app that was responsible for 60% of the top 50 Chinese microdramas last year, according to media analytics consultancy Ndata.
Kuaishou vice president Chen Yiyi said at a media conference in January that the app has 68 titles that have been viewed more than 300 million times last year, four of which have exceeded a billion views.
He said about 94 million people – more than the population of Germany – watch more than 10 episodes a day on Kuaishou. Reuters could not independently verify the data.
Initial episodes on such apps are often free, but viewers may have to pay tens of yuan to watch a microdrama with 64 clips such as “Grandma’s Moon” in full.
Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok owned by internet technology firm Bytedance, is also popular among micro drama fans.
Along with other major Chinese social media apps such as Instagram-like Xiaohongshu and YouTube competitor Bilibili, it has announced plans to create more.
In the United States, micro drama platform Reelshort, whose parent company is backed by Chinese tech giants Tencent and Baidu, recently overtook Netflix in terms of downloads on Apple’s US App Store, according to market researcher Sensor Tower.
“China was the first to discover this audience,” said Leila Cao, a Chinese producer based in Los Angeles. “Hollywood hasn’t realized it yet, but all the Chinese-based companies are already providing content.”
‘Vile and obscene’
The plots of many popular microdramas, including “Grandma’s Moon,” revolve around revenge or a Cinderella-like journey from poverty to riches.
Stories of how circumstances at birth are deterministic and can only be changed by miracles struck a chord with audiences at a time when upward mobility is low and youth unemployment is high in China.
The 26-year-old screenwriter, known by the pen name Camille Rao, said microdramas often feature “people who are lower class one day and upper class the next — you become so rich that you offend the people who used to offend you.”
Rao recently left her low-paying job as a junior producer in the traditional film industry for what she describes as a more dynamic and less hierarchical world of micro drama. She now writes and adapts scripts for the US market.
“Indeed social mobility is much more difficult now. Many people see it as a social reality,” said Shu Ting, an associate professor of Chinese language and literature at Jiangnan University.
He said this had led to a rise in interest in stories about billionaires and wealthy families: “Everyone wants power and wealth, so it’s normal for these kinds of stories to become popular.”
In contrast, fantasy stories involving werewolves and vampires are particularly popular in the US market, several creators told Reuters.
The surge in micro-dramas in China has sparked investigations by the Communist Party.
The National Radio and Television Administration regulator said it conducted a “special rectification campaign” between late 2022 and early 2023, during which it removed 25,300 microdramas, totaling about 1.4 million, because they contained “obscene, bloody, violent, low-level and pornographic content.”
As Chinese leader Xi Jinping promotes values such as loyalty to the Communist Party and heterosexual marriage, the state-owned China Women’s News outlet complained in April that some microdramas “portray unequal and distorted marriage and family relationships as a normal phenomenon” and “deviate from mainstream social values.”
In June, the government began requiring some creators to register microdramas with the NRTA. The regulator did not respond to Reuters’ questions for this story.
The key to the commercial success of these films is the plot twists that force people to pay while traveling or standing in line at the grocery store. Episodes often end with a hook – such as a lover seeing his partner with another man – and viewers have to pay for the next episode to find out what happened.
“The plot of these micro dramas is exaggerated,” said actor Zhu. “The plot is twisted and turns, it’s nonsensical, so it attracts people’s attention and a larger audience wants to watch them.”
Zhu is a lover of cinema and a big fan of Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.” Like many of his colleagues in micro drama, he thinks the genre has limited artistic value. “I see it as fast food: a long drama is a kind of luxurious meal, and a micro drama is fast food.”
But its devoted viewers disagree. Customer service agent Huang Siyi, 28, said she enjoys watching romantic microdramas because “the acting is good and the male and female leads look good.”
“It’s easy to become obsessed with subtle dramas,” he said.
explosive growth
Vertical filming and distribution through social media apps means microdramas can be made with small overhead costs. According to market researcher iResearch, the budget for such films ranges from $28,000 to $280,000.
In the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, “Grandma’s Moon” is being made with a limited budget and deadline. When Reuters visited the set in July, the filming day lasted until 2 a.m. The crew then moved to a new location and shooting resumed at 7 a.m.
The show was shot in just six days, and Zhu, a muscular man with a big smile and boundless energy, says he would play table tennis after hours to keep up with the young crew on set.
“It takes us two to three years to deliver a traditional TV series film, but it only takes us three months to deliver a micro drama, which saves us a lot of time,” said Zhou Yi, showrunner at Chinese gaming giant NetEase (which also produces micro dramas).
As the popularity of micro dramas grows, actor salaries have also risen. Zhu said lead roles used to earn $280 per day, but now lead actors in big productions can earn more than double that, while extras earn just $17 per day.
Zhu, a retired railway employee, began acting in the 1970s in a theater troupe attached to the unit where he worked. He now supports himself through his pension and occasional acting gigs.
Many Chinese micro drama producers eye Western markets, where cultural exports from China have often struggled. NetEase last year began making productions for the US, which it distributes via an app called Loveshots; films made for export are generally not available in China.
Microdramas designed for the West are often created by production and acting crews in Los Angeles and shot on location. Scripts, which tend to be in English, may also revolve around themes of wealth, cheating partners, and miracles.
One of the latest micro dramas on Loveshots is about a woman who miraculously regains the ability to walk after being paralysed for many years – and finds her husband cheating on her.
This article is generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
