In the cold winter of the entire film and television industry, the short drama track, as a unique warm current and a small and broad effect, is attracting many platforms and production teams to enter.
Last year, the number of short dramas filed on the whole network was 398, and this year, this number was broken by the number of records in May alone exceeded 500. Data from Detaven shows that in the first half of this year, 2,859 micro-short dramas were planned and filed in the SARFT's system, with a total of 69,234 episodes.
Mainstream long-term and short-term video platforms have taken advantage of the situation to set up short drama theaters, and on different platforms, some high-quality benchmark cases have emerged. Kuaishou's short drama "The Long Princess is Up" has reached 350 million views; Tencent Video's "Please! Don't Spoil Me This year, the amount of accounts exceeded 20 million, breaking the ceiling of the industry; Mango TV's "Nian Nian Wuming", on Douban, the rating rushed to 7, and the number of ratings reached 25,000, becoming a word-of-mouth work.
The policy level is also moving. In 2022, the State Administration of Radio and Television added a category of micro-short dramas to the filing system. On June 1, 2022, the "Online Drama Film Distribution License" for online dramas and online movies was officially issued, which also includes short dramas. Unified inclusion in supervision also means that the short drama market has entered a standardized development path.
For the protagonists involved in this game, the short drama company and its practitioners, genres such as short dramas, unlike the copyright income of long dramas, are relatively fixed, and it has a newer diversified income. It not only provides a stage for those who do not have the opportunity to make online dramas or online content, but also opens up revenue channels for every media company, especially to open up a new commercialization model for the operation of influencer accounts.
This rolling wave of film and television content iteration seems unstoppable, but what is the real short drama market?
Titanium Media APP recently visited a number of short drama production teams to try to restore the faces of short drama practitioners. In such a group of practitioners at the end of the chain of current despise in China's film and television industry, this group of first wave of gold diggers who bravely entered the short drama market, why did they enter the game, what problems they faced, and what will they leave for this industry?
Platforms have launched special plans for short dramas, and clicking more than 100 million has become the norm
At present, Titanium Media APP observes that on major platforms, the popular mainstream short drama form, mostly 1-3 minutes of content, is pushed to users through a single column of information flow, in a fast-paced, fragmented mode, capturing the current video users' consumer psychology and behavior.
The skits have mobilized the enthusiasm of the whole industry. Kuaishou is one of the first short video platforms to see the potential of short dramas. In August 2019, Kuaishou established the entrance to the "Kuaishou Small Theater", marking Kuaishou's official layout of the short drama business. The following year, Kuaishou launched its first short drama theater label, Gaotian Theater.
In order to solve the problem of commercialization, in December 2020, Kuaishou Short Drama officially released the Kuaishou Astral Plan, hoping to provide partners with a full range of monetization links through bill-sharing rewards, brand investment, live e-commerce, commercial order advertising, etc.
As of October 2021, the total number of feature films of Kuaishou Astral short dramas has exceeded 25 billion, bringing a total of 110 million followers to the creative team, covering 50 TOP institutions. "This male protagonist is a little cold" series, "Qin Ye's Little Dumb", "Rebirth of Little Sweet Wife", "CP Battle", "Single Mother Struggle" and other popular short dramas were born here.
More than 200 million people watch short dramas on Kuaishou every day, the daily active users of short dramas have reached 230 million, the number of short dramas with more than 100 million plays has reached 850, and from January to October, the total number of Kuaishou short dramas has exceeded 770 billion. By the end of 2021, "Kuaishou Astral Short Drama" has incubated 240 independent and customized short dramas, of which more than 100 have received more than 100 million views.
What can be seen with the naked eye is that the strong consumer demand for short dramas on Kuaishou makes Douyin, another giant in the short video field, unable to sit still.
Douyin chose to enter the short drama market strongly this year. In April this year, Douyin launched a new short drama plan, MCN institutions or individual authors can unlock 100-million-level traffic support and millions of cash rewards when they first publish 1-5 minute works with continuous plots on Douyin.
In addition, there is also the "10 Million Explosive Drama Club" plan, which is aimed at the majority of MCNs and professional film and television production companies, and supports and incentivizes short drama creators by means of production guarantee + 300% income cash sharing + traffic incentives.
Two months later, Douyin increased the code again, integrated resources, and upgraded the incentive track. From June 1, Douyin short drama will integrate and upgrade the original "Xinfan Plan" and "Tens of Millions of Popular Drama Clubs", and launch the "Drama Gravity Plan", which has created three tracks: Dou+, Billing, and Drama Star.
Unlike short video platforms, long video platforms are relatively indifferent to short dramas. This cold attitude may be related to its earlier experience of trying short drama content on short video platforms.
As early as 2018, iQiyi laid out the vertical screen micro-drama "Life Started on Me" with a high profile, and announced the billing plan of the short drama.
At the end of 2020, Tencent announced that it would invest 1 billion yuan and 10 billion traffic to support the construction of the micro-short drama content ecosystem. At the end of 2021, Tencent Video officially released the industry's first micro-short drama brand "Shishi Theater".
In September 2021, Youku released the "Fusha Plan" to encourage a series of innovative content, cooperate with IP platforms such as online novels, and produce a large number of micro-short dramas in the mode of high-quality IP + platform investment + publicity/commercialization resources + theatrical scheduling.
Platforms such as Mango TV and Station B have also released plans for micro-short dramas. Mango TV launched the "Da Mang Project" and opened the "Xiafan Theater", while Station B launched a light theater in August 2021, mainly promoting thriller and suspense, soft science fiction, and comedy-themed micro-short dramas.
The crowd of people entering the game is a kind of "forced migration"
Different from the ambition of the platforms to enter the game with heavy money, after a round of interview and research, the titanium media APP found that most of the people who tested the water of the short drama market in the first batch of short drama market and successfully nuggeted gold were forced by survival problems.
As a former main artist agent and now a member of the micro-short drama track, Long Jingjing, founder of soda culture, told Titanium Media APP that they chose to enter the short drama track because they found that when they brought new artists, they had encountered too many walls.
"Do you want to have so many talent shows, so many little brothers and sisters who debut every year, how many can really have the opportunity to continue?"
Hundreds of newcomers who debut in the draft variety show every year are waiting to open their mouths to eat. But the industry competition is too fierce, the main roles of high-quality online dramas and movies have basically been divided between the producers and investors, and the remaining few small roles are difficult to turn to the group of newcomers who have not yet become famous.
Whenever she takes her own artists and picks up work outside, she always feels that she is in a state of "begging grandpa and telling grandma". This also made Long Jingjing find that the fate of newcomer artists can be said to be completely in the hands of film and television production companies and their investment teams.
She also understands that even if artists now have increasingly diverse ways and methods to show themselves, newcomers who want to get out of the circle and gain a foothold in the industry must ultimately rely on a few decent works, and artists' personal growth and business skills are also very much needed to use some works to precipitate.
When the short drama track shone slightly, Long Jingjing saw a new possibility: the threshold for works in this category is not particularly high, there are still more opportunities, and, you know, there are not many people to see. It's a less competitive and promising direction – just as an opportunity for its artists to exercise and practice themselves.
Later, she thought, it is better to simply stand up herself, so that in the upstream of the industrial chain, the company will have a certain right to speak. If they can always find the right investors to contribute funds, they are willing to use this to tailor some suitable works according to their own artists.
The reason why the short drama market has exploded this year, Long Jingjing told Titanium Media APP, is because this content form has solved many pain points in the industrial chain.
Among them, the most critical point is that for investors, short dramas greatly reduce the return on investment period of film and television projects. From project approval, shooting, preparation, launch, and approval, traditional film and television dramas take at least more than a year, but the current investment cycle of the short drama industry is basically within 6 months, and the return can be seen. Moreover, under normal circumstances, a short drama is basically controlled in 3-4 months from the preparation of the project to the later launch.
In the cold winter, Tang Mingming, the founder of the Winter Comic Society, told Titanium Media APP that making short dramas is for the goal of making money. The competition in the novel track and comic track before is already in a white-hot stage, and the company has been sluggish in terms of growth, so I plan to try the film and television series track.
At the beginning, Tang Ming wanted to do a long series, but in this way, when making a long series, the experience of dealing with the platform side "completely hurt" her.
At that time, Tang Mingming's team had been working on the script for 8 months, during which they were constantly communicating new ideas with the long-term video platform, and in the end, the platform told him that the script had already been met. What she thought was that she had finally survived this day. But later, the platform never gave her a clear answer.
At that moment, Tang Mingming found that long videos were no longer suitable for novice players like them. She decided to give up communication with long videos, and she was approached by the head of short drama operations of a short video platform at that time. The two sides hit it off immediately, and the first work exploded the market.
Similar to Soda Culture's other intention to participate in short dramas, Winter Comics also wants to cultivate its own exclusive screenwriting team for low-threshold short dramas. Tang Mingming told Titanium Media APP that the screenwriters under their company need to follow the scene, and only after following the director to shoot the scene, the screenwriter will understand how to create the script next time, and the experience brought by this scene can not be learned behind closed doors at home.
How fast and good to save, 1 million yuan ~ 2 million yuan can also shoot
For the entire industry, lower input costs, shorter production cycles, and higher return on investment are the key factors for the short drama market to explode in a short time.
"You said that the secret of the profitability of the current skit drama, I think it is really to control the cost." Long Jingjing told Titanium Media APP.
Long Jingjing's short drama team started by "saving money" at the beginning. She believes that some money should not be spent, and the savings will come out. For example, when shooting indoor scenes, I went to a real estate company to borrow a model room, unlike the previous idea of some online dramas, I went to build a studio and set up the scene, "The model rooms of these real estates basically rely on us to brush our own faces 'Huo Huo'." ”
There are also some costs, relying on some resources of the producer to "brush the face" to complete. For example, during the filming process of the short drama with the theme of "overbearing president", the male protagonist's car can rely on the relationship of the boss to borrow luxury cars such as Rolls-Royce, and the hand-customized clothing, big-name bags, etc. that the heroine needs can also go to the brand to borrow wool.
The low cost of the short drama is not only reflected in the above costume road and setting, but also in the production cycle, the time of the short drama will be shorter. Zong Nan, the founder of Twelve Liters Xiao, told Titanium Media APP that at present, the approximate preparation period of a short drama in their company is one month, no more than two months.
The production cycle is short, one is because it is limited by the amount of funds for project approval. More importantly, there is a tacit understanding in this industry that most teams do not believe that they can produce better content with a particularly high budget, and they will definitely achieve particularly good returns.
However, with more and more entrants, it seems that the cost of short drama production has risen this year. Long Jingjing told Titanium Media APP that at present, because there are too many competitors in the same industry, to do things well, it is bound to make certain upgrades in some content costs, such as the selection of production teams, the offer of actors, and the costume road and art sets.
As far as her observation is concerned, the current costume category of short dramas has almost reached the production cost of 2 million yuan, and modern dramas are almost 1 million yuan. What's more, the production cost of costume skits by some large production teams has risen to about 5 million. And the production cycle has also changed from 5-6 days before to 15-25 days now.
At present, the whole production level is slowly getting higher and higher. As an emerging industry, short dramas are very similar to the early online movies - at the beginning, the production level of the Internet University was hundreds of thousands, and with the hot market and the boost of capital, the production cost of a top online movie has soared to the level of 450 million, directly comparable to the standard of theater movies.
From luxury to frugality. Long Jingjing also admitted that after doing more than 1 million targets, it will be difficult to start with 300,000 projects.
But Tang Mingming does not think so, she strongly asked the titanium media APP to appeal to the industry, hoping that peers can roll stories, not roll production.
As a firm enforcer of "cost control", Tang Mingming said that behind the rising production costs, it is because the short drama market has begun to heat, and some production companies have raised production costs, so they have the opportunity to ask investors for higher production costs. In her view, rising production fees are just feeding a group of production companies that just want to make money, so as not to train market-sensitive content companies.
Only making every drama profitable is the most important thing.
"You have to figure out one thing, are the users in the short drama market coming to see you to obey the Tao? If it's to watch the Tao, why doesn't he go to watch the big drama? If obedience is the core competitiveness you want, your so-called roll to the production level of several million, you are also good in the short drama, right? She said.
On top of the production, the short drama can properly control the cost, and it is also the story that users care more about when watching the short drama, and they can ignore or tolerate some defects caused by the production cost.
A short drama producer told Titanium Media APP that if you want to make a short drama into an image texture, there are two more common simple methods, the first is to use depth of field to make a virtual and real effect, and the second is color grading.
Once, when they chose to shoot with a prime lens, the actor's facial expressions were very real, but the background behind his ears was all imaginary. At that time, some users directly commented and feedback, "You this thing is not good, I can't see anything." The pursuit of image sense has become a flaw in the eyes of some users. Because they prefer to see everything very clearly in the first person.
A new creative approach to adjust the beat table based on the data
As a product of the short video era, short dramas bring the audience a more impactful and convenient viewing experience, and also require unique innovation in narrative logic. Dense rhythm, strong conflict, and cool points are the three major elements of the short drama. Setting strong conflicts and reversals in a short period of time, providing dense laughs, cool points and strong emotions are the characteristics of the content of the short drama.
From the perspective of genre, love themes still occupy an absolute advantage in the field of short dramas. The "2022 Short Drama Insight Report" released by Maoyan Research Institute shows that sweet pets, revenge, ex-wives, son-in-law, domineering presidents, and celebrities are all high-frequency keywords in short dramas with love themes. In addition, fantasy skits involving settings such as demons, crossing, rebirth, transformation, and body swapping are also common.
However, if it is not the more professional institutions to do short dramas, they will definitely be able to get a piece of the short video pie, and creators who understand the content of short videos and the preferences of short video users can be like a fish in water in the short drama system.
In the Chinese local market, although some well-known directors and the team of head production companies have also begun to "end" to do short dramas. But the industry does not consider this to be a dimensionality reduction blow.
First of all, there is a threshold at the screenwriter level. Most of the current short drama screenwriters are young people, because they naturally understand and adapt to the ecology and gameplay of short videos such as Douyin and Kuaishou. On the contrary, those experienced old screenwriters may not be suitable to be short screenwriters.
"What impressed me very much was that some big screenwriting teachers would write a lot of descriptive content at the beginning, but if you look at it in the way you think about a short play, it's all nonsense." Long Jingjing said.
Short dramas that survive on platforms such as Douyin Kuaishou are characterized by being very fragmented to meet the needs of users to quickly obtain the plot. It is not easy to explain the ins and outs of the story in a minute.
For example, users brush short dramas on Jikuai, they may need to finish a piece of content on the bus or subway, so the plot that slaps at the beginning expresses a very exciting sense of coolness, especially for young people who are now under pressure to find a sense of spiritual pleasure.
Slots require efficiency and speed to obtain the amount of information. In terms of theme, most of the popular short dramas belong to ancient puppets, sweet pets and other themes, which do not need to spend too much energy to think, unlike the kind of suspenseful case-solving works that rely on details to attract attraction.
But this does not mean that the creation of skits is out of the law of script production.
In the view of Xie Duosheng, the founder of OneCreation Video, the creation of short drama scripts will definitely follow the methodology of script creation accumulated in the previous three years, as well as some beat tables. However, these drama schedules will be linked to the most traditional theories of drama, but will not copy the original short, or longer script methodology to create this short play, and will integrate the script structure of the new short play in the middle.
How do I make a trim? Some production teams will collect all the user's viewing habits according to the background data of each sent video, including the completion rate, like rate, and scratch-away rate, and constantly adjust the beat rate according to these data.
The simplest example, when the plot should conflict, when the characters have appeals, will be corrected according to the background data will put the conflict in three seconds, the obstacle in ten seconds, the second obstacle in thirty seconds, and then the theme expression in 50 seconds. According to the background data, the beat table is constantly trimmed, and the beat table is not fixed, it is a process of continuous trimming according to the background data.
Production funding may also become an obstacle for traditional film and television companies. Long Jingjing said that some large companies were used to doing projects of tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions. If you tell each other that this project will cost 1 million yuan, some teams will not know how to spend this 1 million because they have no way to save this money.
The dilemma of monetization: "black box" and billing, as well as the image of the solidified master
Without the support of commercialization, "generating electricity with love" is difficult to support the short drama from a content-based track to an industry, and the industry will have GDP in it, and it needs the positive cycle support of commercialization.
At present, the business model of the short drama track can be roughly divided into billing sharing, platform customization, advertising implantation, live broadcast monetization and paid on-demand screening. Among them, billing is the "mainstream" of short-term monetization.
Soda culture now has about half of its revenue, which comes from traffic sharing. Long Jingjing said that if you do traffic distribution, you will find that all people will look for a methodology for content success, because everyone wants to do it with higher certainty of income.
However, it is not so that the production company fully recognizes the billing model, especially if the basis of the accounting is data.
A producer who requested anonymity told Titanium Media APP that most platforms will still adopt the method of "pre-broadcast rating" to give platform resource positions for bill-sharing dramas.
S-class projects will rush to the homepage of the platform and naturally get a lot of exposure. This has also become a standard for the producer to judge the accounting, if the S-level project has received more exposure, but the actual number of bills in hand is not as good as the A-level, then there must be a problem with the amount of this accounting.
"Billing is like this, it can also be said that the store is a big bully, the platform is how much it says, then in turn, it is how much the platform and how much money it is willing to give you." What the platform says is what it is, the platform says that your project is not good, your project is not good. There is no one standard of certainty. The producer said.
In order to dispel the doubts of production companies, some platforms have now begun to adopt the "post-broadcast rating" model. But some skit companies believe that this still cannot solve the problem of the "data black box" in nature.
In the opinion of one producer, the so-called "post-broadcast rating", that is, the platform evaluates the work based on the data performance of your work, but it is actually unfair, because user data is always a "black box".
"We had this situation before, we went to see how much money some platforms earned by pushing a certain drama to share the account, then you must analyze what people do well? But after reading it, I found that the actor selection is not good, the dubbing is not good, and the production is average, so why is it popular. He gave the Titanium Media APP an example.
It's not that the producer hasn't tried brand placements. But overall, the expectation of ad placement is poor. Long Jingjing told Titanium Media APP that after cooperating with the brand several times, it was found that the market response was not too high, which may be the problem of matching the brand tonality and the user's tonality. Some well-known big brands, although they have sufficient budgets, but in a large number of sinking market short video user groups, the conversion rate may not be very good.
If the platform billing model also carries the shadow of the monetization of the film and television industry dominated by the long video platform, then the construction of the talent account system is a new commercial game for the short drama market.
Content revenue is only a small part of the overall revenue of the skits. In terms of commercialization, platforms have various policies. Most of the platforms provide support policies for traffic sharing, bonus incentives, brand investment, e-commerce live broadcasting, commercial advertising, etc., and improve the monetization link.
The core appeal of short drama producers is to hope that people who do well can earn money for the next drama on the platform. But what the platform hopes more is that creators can continue to rely on content on this platform to generate later monetization, including short video advertising and e-commerce, which is the competitiveness of the core essence of short dramas compared with traditional content.
Take the influencer account as the core, and then create a short drama that fits the future personality of the influencer fans and the influencer. Or the celebrity itself has millions to tens of millions of fans, and then attract foreign fans.
After the head talent became the protagonist of the popular short drama, he based on the character through this drama, and then increased his fans through the personality to do live broadcast and monetize the goods. In the entire revenue structure, the proportion of monetization relying on short drama traffic dividends will increase.
In terms of content form, short dramas that conform to the aesthetics of "scaring face" are naturally suitable for creating a group of talents. In the screen of a vertical mobile phone, the user's visual center of gravity is often biased towards a certain character, which is why it is necessary to look at the person and character first, and then match the corresponding script. In the direction of professional screenwriting, there is a drama structure that first anchors a certain character to be created, and then tells the whole story from the first-person perspective of this character.
Under the model of the talent system of account sharing, benchmark cases have also been run out in the industry.
For example, the heroine of "This Male Protagonist is a Little Cold" Yi Lu, she starred in the Tencent animation adaptation short drama "Ten Thousand Scum Chaohuang" in the Kuaishou Spring Festival file, because of the traffic blessing of the popular drama, her GMV in the entire Spring Festival file reached a new number, the highest single session was nearly 3 million, and the Spring Festival file was just over a month, and the entire GMV was about 15 million.
Another example is the ancient style Yu'er starring in "Phoenix Seeking Phoenix" at the head of the Kuaishou platform, because of the continuous flow theme of short dramas, Yu'er's GMV has also made a greater breakthrough, and the current single session has reached a peak of 12.5 million GMV, which can be compared to the current head anchor in the entire e-commerce industry.
But building a talent account is not a profitable business. The person in charge of Kuaishou short drama operation believes that after a person's person is set at a certain stage, he may quickly enter a bottleneck period. In the short drama industry, there are now gold medal mothers-in-law, gold medal mothers, gold medal daughters-in-law, gold medal grandfathers, and even gold medal sons-in-law and gold medal housekeepers, and there may be a wave of screening in a year or two.
And this wave of screening is doomed, some people may stay in the gold medal mother-in-law and gold medal mother forever, it is difficult to break through their own personality, find a new role more suitable for themselves. (This article was first published in Titanium Media APP, author| Li Chengcheng, editor | Cai Zhanbo)