Scripts, actors, investment and platform, understand the four major traffic codes behind the popularity of short dramas

Who would have thought that during the Chinese New Year, a short drama called "I was a Stepmother in the 1980s" would become popular all over the Internet, with a single-day recharge of 20 million on the day of its release, and hundreds of millions of views also made the producer Mi Meng a lot of money. Moreover, the filming period of this drama was only ten days, and the post-production investment was only tens of thousands of yuan. It is a super successful case of making a small investment for a big investment.

The short drama "Pen" recently launched by iQiyi has also attracted countless attention and sparked a lot of discussion. In fact, the trend of short dramas is rapidly sweeping across major film and television drama platforms. Whether it is short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou that occupy a large sinking market, or long video platforms with a large audience group, they have all increased their layout in the field of short dramas.

According to the iiMedia Research "2023-2024 China Micro-Short Drama Market Research Report", in 2023, the short drama market will have a total of 705 new short dramas with a scale of 37.39 billion, while in 2022 there were only 454, an increase of 55.3%. Obviously, short dramas are currently in the limelight, and the short drama track is bound to continue to soar this year and enter a stage of faster development.

The traffic code of the hit short drama

As a newly emerging entertainment track, although short dramas are not short videos in the traditional sense, they have benefited from the rise of short video platforms.

In 2018, as platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou gradually became popular, a group of short drama writers emerged, mostly comedy and romance types. Many creators also established film and television companies and began to develop drama accounts, providing one-stop services from screenwriting to production, distribution and finally to profit sharing with the platform. This also laid the audience foundation for the subsequent development of the industry and attracted a lot of industry-related talents.

However, the entire short drama industry was still in the exploratory stage at the time, and the business model was immature. Many companies produced works that were too shoddy, causing audience fatigue. It was not until 2021 that short video platforms launched a paid short drama model, and users gradually established a virtuous cycle through subsequent content consumption and conversion.

In 2023, short dramas have gradually reached a mature stage in terms of production, distribution, and subscription models. When users watch videos on short video platforms, the platforms can capture big data information in full, and user portraits can be quickly drawn up, which will feed back to industry investors and make short dramas stand out.

The reason why short dramas can attract users and form a huge sinking market is closely related to their fast-paced, emotional, and constantly exciting content style.

Similar to online literature, micro-short dramas can generally be divided into two types: "male frequency" and "female frequency". First of all, the names are simple and crude enough, such as the popular "I was a Stepmother in the 1980s", "Mr. Li, You Got the Wrong Wife", "Oh, the Queen Is Here to Work", "After a Flash Marriage, Mr. Fu's Vest Can No Longer Be Hide", "The Black Lotus Manual for Advancing to the Top", "The Unparalleled Son-in-Law", etc., you can know the core content just by looking at the titles.

Of course, the most fundamental reason why the short drama is so addictive is that it grasps the spiritual core of a part of the audience. There is basically not much foreshadowing, and the context of the character relationships is clearly presented at the beginning. After a few dozen seconds, it enters the main storyline, and then opens the golden finger of destiny for the protagonist, and his life begins to cheat.

In fact, in the male-oriented world, grassroots people counterattack and are reborn to become the chosen ones, holding power and enjoying beautiful women. The multiple reversals also have obvious sexual fantasy settings.

In the world of female frequency, the heroine usually has a miserable life experience. When she comes to an unfamiliar environment, she continues to be oppressed and bullied by different groups of people. However, she relies on her beauty and intelligence to win the heart of her other half who has a strong background and handsome looks. She can also use her scheming to launch a revenge plan, from killing the scumbag, to dealing with the stepmother's enemies, to killing the vicious female supporting role, etc. She kills gods and Buddhas all the way, with N exciting moments in one minute, which makes women crazy.

Especially in the past year, in order to adapt to the current popular trend of independent and sober heroines, the short drama writers have not forgotten to incorporate plots of women pursuing careers, traveling around the world, and making a fortune, which perfectly blends with the direction of public opinion.

In the final analysis, the reason why short dramas are so popular is that they have found the code for traffic and accurately grasped the spiritual core of contemporary workers. They have copied a template of an ideal life for them in their exhausted and powerless lives, bringing everyone significant sensory stimulation, thereby increasing the conversion and monetization rate of short dramas.

However, the plots of such short plays are often simple, with many exciting moments in one minute, and the characters are highly homogenized. The performances are like tools, and the lines are like assembly lines, which has prompted the short play industry to actively explore new paths. Therefore, under the mechanism of survival of the fittest in the industry, practitioners began to look for more innovative scripts, which is what the industry often says, "the script determines the profit and loss of the short play." For example, Mi Meng will continue to recruit new authors to write scripts that meet the current aesthetics based on user preferences and market demand.

Take the first domestic virtual production short drama "Seven People's Lives" as an example. It not only incorporates the elements of orthodox reasoning, but also uses a multi-line narrative method to attract many audiences. The drama also uses a combination of virtual reality and real-life shooting to achieve innovation in the form of expression.

Under the call of the innovative spirit, many dramas now tend to be more realistic, such as family ethics, crime suspense, or to the well-made ancient style track, creating oriental classical aesthetics. However, no matter what the subject matter is, the basic point is to produce the comfort of dopamine in the reversal and spiraling plot.

In addition, it is undeniable that the success of a hit short drama is inseparable from the blessing of the actors, and the star-making function can also help boost the popularity of the drama. For example, in the drama "I was a Stepmother in the 1980s", the female lead looks like Shirley, and the male lead is a mixture of Huo Jianhua and Xiao Zhan. After watching the clips, users have a great interest in chasing the drama, and the actors have also gained a certain degree of popularity due to their works.

Marketing investment determines success or failure

The popularity and exposure of any drama is inseparable from a strong marketing strategy. In the field of short dramas, the importance of marketing methods such as traffic investment has risen to become a key factor in determining its success or failure.

Taking advantage of the platform's traffic, how producers accurately push the content of the drama to the target audience is a particularly skillful task. For the pitchers, they bear the heavy responsibility of effectively linking the content of the work with the users. For the editors, it is also a very challenging task to cut a work into easy-to-spread clips and arouse the curiosity of the target audience.

Some of them directly cut out the climax of the work, while others do secondary creation. No matter which method is used, the purpose is to make the wonderful clips or lines in a short play appear in the public eye in the shortest time, trigger viral spread on social media, and attract users to consciously jump to third-party mini-programs. When the plot is exciting, they will actively pay to watch the subsequent plot. At this point, the investment of a drama can be called a success.

In addition, during the streaming process of short dramas, the streamers will hold a large amount of materials, and through carefully designed test plans, match test accounts, and allocate test budgets of several thousand to tens of thousands to evaluate which materials will become popular.

Nowadays, there are indeed more and more teams involved in investment and flow. In the past, they were short drama platforms, short video platforms and content contracting companies. Now that short dramas are in vogue, a group of editing and operating companies have emerged.

But now in the era of content oversupply, most works in the short drama field do not make money, and the industry also conforms to the 80/20 rule. It is an industry-recognized fact that ten hit dramas support a hundred flops. This has led to constant adjustment and change in the investment and traffic strategies of various companies. For example, some short dramas will encourage audience participation and interaction by setting topic challenges and soliciting audience opinions, thereby enhancing the audience's identification and loyalty to the works and achieving good commercial returns.

Facing short dramas, the different tones of long and short video platforms

Most of the short dramas we watch nowadays are jumped from short video platforms to third-party mini-programs. Many of these short drama content outputs and productions come from MCN and small film and television companies. Compared with the investment cost of long dramas of tens of millions, an investment of hundreds of thousands is enough for short dramas, because the cost of trial and error is low and the investment is small, the main focus is short and fast, the cash flow back is rapid, and the platform can share the profits, and the payback period is fast. As a result, many bad works have been born, such as the often criticized content logic is inconsistent, and the characters are flat and single.

However, these companies also have unique advantages. They have personal IP to rely on, can deeply cultivate certain platforms, and successfully open up the mini-program links of Kuaishou, Douyin, and Video Number. In this process, the user stickiness is strong through the reach of the mini-programs, forming a certain amount of private domain traffic, making the advertising flow efficiency higher and forming a complete closed-loop link.

Some of them have gained popularity overseas. The short drama app Reelshort, which was launched in August last year, quickly became popular and even surpassed TikTok to top the list of entertainment app downloads on iOS in the United States. The stock price of the development company behind it, China Online, has soared.

Short dramas have become a new track for the rapid rise of Internet entertainment. Short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou are also actively developing their business. There is no need to say much about their advantages. Compared with many mini-program platforms, the number of users alone is staggering.

However, their disadvantages are also obvious. Users of short video platforms may be more inclined to browse and share short videos rather than watch short dramas for a long time, which may lead to insufficient user loyalty. In short, although short video platforms have certain advantages in entering the short drama market, they also face considerable challenges. They need to continuously innovate and optimize content to improve user stickiness. However, for the "small, fast and smart" short drama industry, the response speed may be slower than that of some small companies.

Short video platforms want to get a piece of the pie, and established long video platforms such as iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video, and Mango TV will not miss such an opportunity. In fact, these companies started their layout not too late. The early short dramas "Never Expected" and "D Si Men" were both produced by long video platforms. However, in terms of industry attributes, long video platforms are still more willing to produce long dramas. It was not until the rise of short videos that the big brothers had to pay attention to this field.

In order to occupy the leading position, these companies have stepped up their efforts to reserve micro-short dramas. The long video platforms are capable of beating other types of platforms in terms of quality, and they are not as extremely dependent on traffic as the mini-program short dramas.

However, long video platforms also have disadvantages, because most paying users will still prefer to watch long dramas with big IPs and big productions on the site. The group watching short dramas is obviously not large enough, and the user stickiness of short dramas is not as good as the first two.

In general, in the process of survival of the fittest, companies that are extremely dependent on traffic and have clichéd content will be eliminated first. Only those that produce high-quality, high-quality products can attract users for a long time. Teams and creators who only pursue making quick money will ruthlessly disappear in the waves.

In this regard, some short drama platforms can still learn from the development ideas of long video platforms, continuously improve innovative content and shooting methods, diversify the subject matter, and allow short drama versions of high-quality dramas like "The Long Season" to be born in this track as soon as possible.

Being small but not weak, short but not shallow is the real breakthrough in the short drama industry.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.