Rhino Entertainment Original
Text|Fat Department Editor|Park Fang
With temperatures in various places breaking through the 30-degree mark, spring has officially come to an end, and looking back at the "off-season" of the drama market in the traditional perception, some changes are taking place this year.
During this period, most of the dramas still continued the performance of difficult data breakthrough and influence not out of the circle, but compared with previous years, the difference this year is that the platform is more willing to try more genres; Second, from the perspective of the market, whether it is "half a hit" "Who is he" or "Long Season" with a good reputation, the performance is rare in the same period in the past.
Change is happening. Spy war dramas, a classic genre that have not been seen for many years, have Tencent Video "Infernal" and Mango TV's "Thin Ice" launched at the same time; During this period, iYouteng launched a large number of suspense content, which in the past would be relatively concentrated in the summer, and Tencent Video also used "The Long Season" to add a fire to the newly released "X Theater".
What is more noteworthy is that there is finally a hit in spring, which is also the point where the so-called "off-season" has formed an essential breakthrough. It should be believed that after the long video industry can really maintain a certain frequency of good content, it is continuously improving the industry ecology. After experiencing leapfrog development in 2022, this spring is witnessing changes taking place, releasing the benefits belonging to the industry.
This year's drama is a hit, so you don't have to wait until the summer
It should be considered that the market environment last spring objectively had more control dividends than this year, which was more conducive to promoting drama data. But from the final effect, this year's data is better than last year, both in terms of overall and head content.
Rhino Jun roughly counted the dramas that have entered the top 3 daily lists of Maoyan, Lighthouse, Yunhe and other industries from February to May this year, and adopted relatively reliable data such as station popularity and Douban score to reflect the popularity and word of mouth of this year's spring dramas.
Compared with the previous changes, three keywords can be roughly refined: real out of the circle, full platform, and more innovation.
There is no need to say much about the real circle, and I will not repeat the previous data performance of "The Long Season" and "Who Is He" here. It should be noted that a large number of Douban 7-point and 8-point dramas appear on the list, including "The Silk Silk Case of Daming under the Microscope" that rose with word-of-mouth fermentation popularity after the end of last year's "Crime Hunting Guide".
In contrast, the top three in the Maoyan popularity list last spring, "The Gate of Rebirth", "The Rest of Your Life, Please Advise" and "And Try the World", the Douban scores were 6.7 points, 6 points, and 5.7 points, respectively.
This further verifies Rhino Jun's previous judgment that the influence of word of mouth on popularity is amplifying. It should be pointed out that the popularity of "Long Season" on Tencent Video is actually far from the 30,000 hit line, but considering the high-value attributes of the show to attract audiences, as well as the longer value cycle and influence, the value of this word-of-mouth hit may be the highest in the entire list.
All platforms, but also the characteristics after last summer, that is, in different cycles, almost all platforms can come up with the head of the hot, not a few platforms alone.
In addition to the above-mentioned dramas, the dramas with good data this spring include iQiyi's "Homecoming", Tencent Video's "Love Only" and "Ordinary Road", Youku's "Long Moon Ember Ming", Mango TV's "Warm and Sweet" and so on.
But in contrast, this spring still did not appear like last summer, there were several popular dramas that took turns to occupy the top and show dominance, except for the above episodes, most of the content did not show long-term consecutive championship ability, and could only circulate in the top few of each list.
The change of the industry requires a process, and many of these works still show the production inertia of the industry, although in the environment of cost reduction and efficiency increase, the production capacity continues to be optimized, but the roughness at the script level is becoming more and more difficult to meet the needs of the audience, and even some dramas have the first day of the list, but soon the follow-up is weak.
And in the content that really breaks out of the siege, innovation is showing more and more critical value.
In fact, spring is the most obvious aesthetic retro style of the series, and a considerable proportion of the content of each platform is still placed on family and life; This year, a number of online data have also begun to appear based on the popularity of TV broadcasts, including "The Road of Life", "Our Day", "Wishful Thinking", etc., which is the result of the further diversification of the long-form video audience.
But if you want to break the circle from the online video field, you can't live without innovation. Throughout the first quarter of this year, almost all of the content out of the circle has genre innovation and mixed actions.
Tencent Video's "Long Season" adds era and regional narratives, and the narrative technique is also bold; "Love Only" adds a considerable proportion of workplace content to the sweet pet theme; iQiyi's "Daming under the Microscope" finds a resonance point through ancient and modern times in suspense; Youku's "Starfall into Sugar" won the audience's favor with the black lotus heroine.
Some content with a good reputation will affect the popularity due to insufficient innovation, homogeneity, and lack of points to attract audience discussion.
The platform is continuously raising production requirements in this process. At least from this year, the industry efficiency drive market is becoming a reality, in the face of the continuous improvement of user demand, but also show the ability to continue to meet. Being able to create a blockbuster in the spring is just the beginning, and with the arrival of the summer season, the long video industry deserves more expectations.
Will the summer season be better than last year?
The spring performance is also driving new expectations. The launch of "Menghualu" on June 2 last year can be described as a clarion call for the entire industry. How this wave of industry breakthroughs, which began last summer, will be undertaken this year is still unknown.
Recent dramas such as "Back Wave", "Three Divided Wild", "Wife's New World", etc., from the perspective of popularity to discussion, there is not much trend to detonate the heat of the industry in advance. However, it should be pointed out that it is ideal to be able to reproduce last year's grand situation at the beginning of June, and the difficulty is not the same as last year.
There are several reasons for this. First, from last summer, to the explosive tide at the end of the year to the immortal fight during the Spring Festival, the cost reduction and efficiency increase of the whole industry has raised the aesthetic threshold of the audience, and a higher aesthetic system has been formed.
The more basic is the production level, such as the use of the actor's original lines, not suitable for stand-ins, whether the service is in line with the evidence, how exquisite it is, and the deeper level includes the immersion provided by the plot and the value recognition brought by the characters. The innovations of "Love Only" and "Ordinary Road" in the spring all show the audience's demand for emotional value.
Second, from the perspective of the objective environment, the recent tightening of the management of the entertainment content industry may make it more difficult to set the show, after "Ning An Like a Dream" was withdrawn on the day it was to be broadcast. In addition, this summer also did not have the dividends brought by last year's epidemic stay-at-home.
Third, it needs to be objectively recognized, and the overall popularity of last summer's file is still contingent in addition to the inevitable factors of the industry, which is the characteristic of the content industry.
At least from the performance of the industry this spring, the ability of industry platforms to create popular content has improved, and the frequency of explosive models is indeed increasing. Expectations for summer episodes should not be excessive, but there is still an inevitability in the emergence of new hits.
Platforms currently hold a number of content deemed "ready to explode", most of which may meet audiences in the summer.
Among them, iQiyi has Yang Mi + Gong Jun's "Fox Demon Little Red Lady Moon Red Chapter", Ding Yuxi + Yang Chao's "Seven Times Auspicious "and Gong Jun + Zhong Chuxi's "I Want to Go Against the Wind" and so on; In terms of Tencent Video, Di Li Gerba + Tong Dawei's "Public Prosecution" was launched today, as well as Yang Zi + Zhang Wanyi's "Sauvignon Blanc", Zhao Liying + Lin Xinxin's "Walking with Feng", and the spy war drama "Lurker" starring Huang Xiaoming.
In addition, Youku has Di Li Gerba + Gong Jun's "Anle Chuan", Mango TV's popular IP drama "Da Song Youth Zhi 2", etc., from the production time point of view, there is a possibility of summer launch.
Whether this year's summer file will perform better than last year can only be said to be a good expectation. Looking at the industry capabilities after the spring, higher explosive output frequency, better production capabilities, and more innovative practitioners are bringing about changes little by little, and this may make people more confident in the performance of summer dramas.