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Recently, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) intensively issued the Notice on Further Strengthening the Management of Network Micro-short Plays and Implementing the Creation Promotion Plan (click for me to view) and the Opinions on Promoting the Prosperity and Development of Short Plays (click for me to view), making policy adjustments to micro-short plays and short plays. At present, the competition among major platforms for miniseries has entered the stage of deep involution, and seven video platforms, namely Aauto Quicker, Tik Tok, Youku, Tencent, Mango TV, bilibili and iQiyi, have entered the game one after another. This paper focuses on the introduction of micro-short plays on the heads of major platforms for friends to grasp the current development of micro-short plays.
author | Professor Zhao Hui, National Social Science Art Project "Current Status, Problems, Countermeasures and Development Trends of Miniature Plays" Team: Zhao Hui, Tian Yawen, Wang Sihan, Bao Yan, Lin Yijia.
read and edit | Time
edit | Peninsula
source | Media No.1 (ID: zcfhxy)
Micro-short plays have entered the stage of deep involution, and various platforms have entered the game one after another, showing the appearance of a hundred flowers blooming.
In terms of short video platform, Aauto Quicker was the first to enter the game, with emotion, youth, family and comedy taking turns, followed by Tik Tok, who poked the pain point of life with content and paid attention to humanistic care. In terms of long video platform, Youku has always been the leader in word-of-mouth and quantity. Tencent has built a very aesthetic theater with ten points, Mango TV emphasizes quality, and short plays frequently appear in circles. bilibili has taken the road of creative brain-burning early, and Iqiyi finally joined and is catching up.
After experiencing brutal growth and fierce competition, short plays will eventually embark on the road of quality and diversification.
Aauto Quicker: Four major content tracks take turns to debut.
Since 2019, the number of short plays in Aauto Quicker has reached 12,000, and the number of short plays with the head star has exceeded 350. According to the summary data of Aauto Quicker Short Plays page, 203 short plays were launched from January to August in 2022, with sweet pets, ancient customs and families dominating.

△ Data source: Milan Communication Consulting Video Network Communication Monitoring and Research Database Data monitoring time: January 1, 2022-August 26, 2022.

By the end of 2021, among the 240+ short plays of Aauto Quicker Xingmang, more than 100 plays have exceeded 100 million, and there are more head contents such as "princess royal Up" with 350 million+plays and "Ten Thousand Slags in the Phoenix" with 420 million+plays. According to the data of Milan, from 2021 to 2022, Aauto Quicker’s short plays TOP5 were princess royal on the Top, Remarriage, Women’s Awakening, All Slags in the Morning, My Pride and Grandfather, all of which were love themes.
The four main content tracks of Aauto Quicker Xingmang short play are urban emotion, family empathy, youth inspirational and comedy. Comparing the content creation in January-March with that in April-July, we will find that the content of urban emotion is gradually declining, and more creators tend to try youth inspirational and comedy. In addition, the family empathy track has become the focus of Aauto Quicker’s short plays, and Nian Sa, Cheng Feng, Hutong Er and The Uneven Bowl of Water are broken because they are close to users’ lives.

△ Data source: Milan Communication Consulting Video Network Communication Monitoring and Research Database Data monitoring time: January 1, 2022-August 7, 2022.
Tik Tok: Drama has gravity to release humanistic care.
Compared with Aauto Quicker, the short play track in Tik Tok started late. In 2021, Tik Tok launched a new plan. In June 2022, Tik Tok integrated and upgraded the original plan, and launched a drama gravity plan. According to the different types of creators, three tracks were built, namely, Dou+, Fenzhang and Drama Star. By August, 2022, there were 267 short plays on Tik Tok Platform in 2021-2022, with a wide range of themes, mainly urban, magical and emotional. # Tik Tok’s video content related to short plays has exceeded 30 billion.


△ Data monitoring time: January 1, 2022-August 7, 2022
According to the data of Milan, from 2021 to 2022, the short drama TOP5 on the Tik Tok platform was Night Diary, Confessions of an Evil Woman, My Landlord and Grandma, Your Motherhood Series 2 in the Future, and Strange Writer, which covered pension issues, doctor-patient disputes and real life pain points, and its content creation was full of humanistic care.

△ Data source: Milan Communication Consulting Video Network Communication Monitoring and Research Database Data monitoring time: January 1, 2022-August 7, 2022.
Tencent: Very theater, very aesthetic.
In December, 2021, Tencent released the Ten Theater, covering the drama content of comedy season, suspense season, national wind season, interactive season and other categories, marking the new stage of Tencent video’s exploration of the quality of micro-short dramas.
Previously, Tencent had begun to lay out mini-dramas and achieved good results. According TOP5 statistics from Milan, in 2021, the influences of Tencent’s mini-short plays were Dream, Brother, Please Follow the Script, Roll the Pinion, Give You My Exclusive Favor, The Little Fox Fairy of the General’s Family, with more than 20,000 online media reports, 303,000 mentions by Weibo and 320 million hits by Tencent.
In the short drama influence TOP5 from January to August 2022, "Please! Don’t spoil me achieved a score of 30 million+,with 1,886 articles reported by online media, 73,000 mentioned by Weibo and 460 million hits by Tencent. In addition, the sub-accounts of "Datang Snacks" exceeded 15 million, and the sub-accounts of "Wife’s Counter-offensive" and "Give You My Exclusive Favor" exceeded 10 million, all of which achieved good results.

△ Data source: Milan Communication Consulting Video Network Communication Monitoring and Research Database Data monitoring time: January 1, 2021-December 31, 2021.

△ Data source: Milan Communication Consulting Video Network Communication Monitoring and Research Database Data monitoring time: January 1, 2022-August 7, 2022.
Youku: Leading word of mouth, quantity first.
Youku launched the short drama business in 2019 and has always been a leader in word-of-mouth and commercialization. In September, 2021, Youku released a plan to boost short drama, which built a bridge of cooperation between short drama producers and major literary animation IP platforms, and participated in the project creation in the form of investment and accounting.
According to statistics from Milan, the number of short plays of Youku ranks first among the five platforms, and its quality and influence are also in the forefront. In 2021, in the TOP5 of Youku’s miniseries, Weibo mentioned 390,000 pieces of Heartbeat Love, and Weibo played it 486,000 times. From the layout to the frequent head works, and then to the new exploration of profit model, Youku has explored a development path of parallel development and integration with the industry in the long-term practice, which shows the determination of Youku platform to continue to invest in micro-short dramas.
In 2022, Youku’s short plays continued to exert their strength, adhering to the fundamental principle that content is the best quality, staying awake and insisting on content first. According to the statistics of Meilande, among the top five influential short plays of Youku in 2022, Don’t Run Wild with My Sister and I Haven’t seen the Only Daughter, all reached a high online volume, with 1,299 and 2,300 online media reports respectively, and Don’t Run Wild with My Sister reached 5 million in the first round.
It can be seen that Youku focuses on and even creates user needs in content creation, expanding sporadic explosions and fine products into normalized, characteristic and high-quality mass-produced content, creating unique advantages and forming core competitiveness. Take "The Maid of a Thousand Daughters" jointly produced by Youku and Datang Star as an example. This drama won tens of millions of points with millions of investments. The reason is that it completed a series of thoughts on users, focus and track with the platform at the creative stage. From the selling point in the early stage, the male actor Su moved to create it, and to the platform giving accurate second suggestions on drama logic and production details in the later stage, Youku has formed a set of effective micro-short dramas in the long-term exploration.

△ Data source: Milan Communication Consulting Video Network Communication Monitoring and Research Database Data monitoring time: January 1, 2021-December 31, 2021.

△ Data source: Milan Communication Consulting Video Network Communication Monitoring and Research Database Data monitoring time: January 1, 2022-August 7, 2022.
Mango TV: strict quality control and diverse elements.
Mango TV devotes itself to creating Damang short plays, with love women as the main theme, and sweet pet plays as the mainstream, introducing fresh elements such as script killing, infinite flow, quick wear, etc. to avoid the homogenization of similar themes. For example, suspense elements are added to "The Woman Who Can’t Raid" to strengthen the story, and the fantasy setting is added to "The Queen of the Attack" to tell the story of the routine of chasing the wife crematorium.
Different from Tencent’s sweet pet short plays, mangoes are mostly customized, and the opinions of the platform are highly weighted, and strict quality control has achieved good results. In 2022, Mango TV launched the explosion of "Ignorance", with Douban score as high as 7, and the cumulative broadcast volume was nearly 600 million in the case of basically zero announcement.
In November 2022, Damang Project Studio reached a strategic cooperation with Tomato Fiction and Minimum Aperture Film, aiming at integrating the advantages of the three parties, building an industrial chain and promoting the symbiosis and mutual benefit of high-quality literary works and film and television dramas. It is reported that the Damang Project Studio and Tomato Fiction will jointly create 10 short plays, which will be produced by Minimum Aperture Films, among which "Lost in Ignorance 2" will be included, and drama series and novels will be launched simultaneously, so that drama series and online literature will collide with each other, transform each other, and maximize the volume and value of IP.

△ Data source: Milan Communication Consulting Video Network Communication Monitoring and Research Database Data monitoring time: January 1, 2021-December 31, 2021.

△ Data source: Milan Communication Consulting Video Network Communication Monitoring and Research Database Data monitoring time: January 1, 2022-August 7, 2022.
Bilibili: The Road to Creative Brain Burning
Although bilibili was a latecomer to the short play, his main light theater showed the characteristics of differentiation from the beginning. The works in the light theater tend to be younger as a whole, and almost all the contents are highly related to the current popular culture. The creativity with wide brain holes is often used to enhance the audience’s sense of gain.
In the first season of Light Theater, the masterpiece "Night Cat Express’s Dark Night Dream" and "Catch the Horse Detective", the former was shortlisted in the official short drama competition unit of Cannes International TV Festival, which is an urban fantasy story with metaphorical style, while the latter was located in the story of sand sculpture, with a large number of movie stalks such as Infernal Affairs and New never to lose added in style, and even bilibili’s characteristic stalks such as entrance examination and invitation code appeared.
In 2022, The Studio Diary, the opening work of the second season of Light Theater, went online, and landed on the hot list of Tik Tok and Zhihu and the hot post of Douban for many times. The broadcast volume of Tik Tok topic exceeded 160 million, and the total broadcast volume of bilibili exceeded 44.598 million. Sir, I want to calculate a divination, There is a peach blossom next door, and Struggle for the Dragon’s Sky, followed closely. In only two years of exploration, bilibili’s mini-plays showed uniqueness.

△ Data source: Milan Communication Consulting Video Network Communication Monitoring and Research Database Data monitoring time: January 1, 2021-December 31, 2021.

△ Data source: Milan Communication Consulting Video Network Communication Monitoring and Research Database Data monitoring time: January 1, 2022-August 7, 2022.
Iqiyi: the new entrant of short play
Comparatively speaking, the micro-short drama creation of iQiyi platform is in a backward state among the five long video platforms. However, on November 10, 2022, iQiyi officially released the cooperation mode of network micro-short drama. For the upstream micro-short drama creators, a series with a single episode of 2 to 15 minutes and complete and coherent content can be launched on the iQiyi platform through the mode of member payment and accounting or CPM advertising. Among them, the content of a single episode with a duration of 2 to 10 minutes adopts CPM advertising accounting mode; For the content with a duration of 10 to 15 minutes in a single episode, the mode of member payment and accounting +CPM advertising accounting is adopted. In terms of the distribution of income from the payment of members, iQiyi continues the revenue statistics and sharing mechanism of the superposition of the new members, the effective viewing time of members and the advertising income, which have been applied in the online drama market, and at the same time opens seven-terminal data to the film. Aiqiyi’s inclusion of online miniseries in the platform accounting mode means that Aiqiyi hopes to attract more excellent content creators to produce diversified content, and the creators and viewers of miniseries will be able to achieve more fair and efficient content creation and consumption support.
The long video platform also actively seeks innovative development of drama forms with traditional satellite TV and other audio-visual platforms. For example, Tencent’s video and satellite TV resources are integrated to carry out drama reform with short band and long band, and Mango TV and Himalaya jointly launched the first domestic audio-video dual-platform simulcast short drama "The Rumor of Doctor Lu", and Youku’s multi-angle interactive short drama "When I Wake Up" is based on itself and pays attention to young positive energy users, and has made more explorations on the boundaries of micro-short dramas.
