2023 must be a year of intense ink in the history of short dramas, and the myth of wealth creation is intensifying in this industry. Regardless of whether they have ever been involved in related industries, they are eager to devote themselves to the short drama career, and there are a large number of operations on social ** to receive scripts, form a team, and make a fortune together. At the end of August, the mini program short drama "Wushuang" was recharged more than 55 million yuan within 24 hours after it was launched, and it exceeded 100 million yuan 8 days later. 
Source: Little Red Book.
On the surface, the concept is hot and the imagination is large, but in fact, the relevant industrial chain is complete, and the capital and talents continue to enter. According to this standard, short dramas have suddenly become the number one outlet in the content industry in 2023. According to data released by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, in the first half of 2023, more than 480 micro-short dramas will be launched on various online platforms in China, exceeding the number in the whole of 2022, which is equivalent to an average of 27 parts. Industry insiders are also toHedgehog Commune (ID: Ciweigongshe)said: "It's not difficult for an actor to shoot a short drama a day. A certain actress made 48 short plays in two months, an average of 6 per week, almost one a day. Evan, the producer of the head short drama company, believes that if the world is a grass stage team, the short drama industry is the most extreme grass stage team. And for many people, looking around, they can't find a person who is watching a short drama around them, on the one hand, the rapid progress of the short drama industry, "production and sales are booming", and on the other hand, almost no one around them is a user of the short drama, which is quite divided. It's easy to get into doubt:Who the hell is paying to watch the skitAt the beginning of 2023, Douyin's public data shows that the platform has a number of micro-short dramas with more than 100 million daily deduplication users. On Xiaohongshu, there are as many as 320,000 notes about "short dramas". In 2022, the daily active users of Kuaishou short dramas will exceed 2600 million, of which more than half of the audience has the Xi of chasing dramas, and by the end of 2022, the total number of Kuaishou Xingmang short dramas has exceeded 50 billion. 61 is the copywriting planner of an Internet company in Beijing, and the most commonly used apps are Bilibili, Douyin and Xiaohongshu. She had never used Kuaishou before, and not long ago, because she was planted by a skit, she deliberately installed Kuaishou. She described to the Hedgehog Commune the process of being attracted to the skit: "When visiting station B, it is easy to be planted by the ** of the second creation, drowning in suspense, pure love debuts, who can hide?".(The single of "Hanging Drowning" singer Ge Dongqi often appears as BGM in the love movie clip**.) Liuyi's preferred type of short drama is Tanmei, she said that because there are relatively few dramas with this kind of theme, as long as the appearance is acceptable, it is easy to be planted. recalled his first short play in the pit: "It was a story of a drama dressed as a bride to marry into an enemy family, and he was at ease with revenge between two sons. Looking back now, it didn't look good or go on much, and even the logic of the plot was not smooth, and the CP line was not obvious, it all depended on the audience's brain to make up for it, and they were looking for sugar in the. ”
But she still finished reading it in one go, because it was too short, supported by a main suspense plot, and the rhythm was very fast, so I finished watching it unconsciously. And the comment area is very funny, netizens ** snorting sugar, interpreting the plot, Amway's other dramas, and the interaction is more interesting. It can be regarded as a gathering place for niche like-minded people. She added. 
Screenshot of the short drama "Full of Wind and Rain Locking Huaizhou" 丨 Source: Interviewee.
In addition, some curious themes will also stimulate her curiosity and desire. Liuyi once swiped a slice of the scene about "Ghost Marriage" on Douyin, and the suspense was very strong, because she couldn't jump, she made a special trip to Kuaishou to search, but only a few episodes were updated at the time, and she forgot to chase it after watching it, and now she can't even recall her name. Fangte, a product manager at a major Internet company in Beijing, had a similar experience. He once swiped a mini program short drama in Kuaishou, with about 50 episodes in the whole play, and after 20 episodes, he needed to jump to the mini program to pay. Fang Te recalled: "At the beginning of the short film, the male protagonist lost his mother since he was a child, and only when his father leaves home can the male protagonist grow up healthily, but the male protagonist needs to worship the old locust tree outside the courtyard as his godfather." At lunchtime on weekdays, Fangte usually eats with a short play, which arouses his curiosity, but he also doesn't remember the title of the play, and he can only vaguely restore the plot, and vaguely remembers one or two of the scenes - the old locust tree was finally deceived by the female ghost, and was struck by lightning, and the strange story of the male protagonist and the female ghost being together. He said bluntly:"The best actor in this drama is the old locust tree. ”When Fang Te listed his favorite drama titles recently, the first thing that came to his mind was the Japanese drama "Restart Life". And "Restart Life" has a score of 9 on Douban4 points, this drama is constructed by warm daily life and trivial dialogues, burying the highlights between the details, and telling the emotions of the protagonist group with delicate and humorous brushstrokes, so as to poke at the emotional resonance. To this, he explained: ".This is the real psychological state of workers。At work, the brain is running at high speed, and the rest time is very fragmented, and I want to watch something that doesn't require my brain but is very refreshing. Liuyi also said: "The finished short drama can be watched in one breath on a weeknight, and the consumption cost is very low, unlike online texts, which often cost hundreds of chapters, and the cost of trial and error is also very low, in less than a minute, you can know whether the drama is good or not, if you don't want to watch it, you can just scratch it away and give up at any time." Therefore, the audience of short dramas is not only in the sinking market, and users' demand for brainless cool dramas has always been there, but this time it has been seen by more people (non-practitioners). Many ** have reported that this wave of short dramas is a market supported by middle-aged men in lower-tier cities, but Evan believes that this data has long been outdated, and more than half of the top 20 dramas in the top 20 dramas they monitor are female frequency short dramas. Today (November 28), the short drama with the number one heat value is "After the Divorce, I Became the Granddaughter of the World's Richest Man". He said: "Short dramas are the same as short **,The core logic is that content finds people, in fact, the more sinking users, the more difficult it is to find and the more difficult it is to pry. With the tightening of the supervision of short dramas, production companies have become more cautious when accepting scripts, and all scripts that blindly rely on rubbing edges and beating each other to attract attention are all rejected. Many people in the industry pointed out that short dramas are not as rumored to make a profit, and the ratio of loss balance profit is roughly between 7:2:1, but the shooting cost of short dramas is getting higher and higher. In 2022, the production cost of short dramas will still stay at 100 yuan per minute, and in the second half of 2023, the cost of short dramas will be as high as 1-20,000 yuan per minute. Of course, not all of the high costs are used at the production level, and the investment accounts for a large proportion, and the cost of a short drama release plus promotion can reach 200-4 million yuan. Despite this, even if only 10% of the short dramas can explode, it is enough for the short drama company to cover the investment of the whole year, such a business model is like buying scratch tickets, only by scraping constantly, can there be hope of "exploding". 
Source: Xiaohongshu account @beautiful
Although the explosion is destined, there are still traces to follow. According to the Hedgehog Commune, the actor's appearance is the key factor to attract users to watch it. The star itself is a traffic entrance, but there is no star in the short drama, and for users, the most eye-catching thing is the face of the male and female protagonists. Rex, the founder of the short drama production company Dodo Films, once told a podcast about a joke that was widely circulated in the short drama industry. Under normal circumstances, the number of people in the short drama company is small, less than 100 people, the workload is very large, and colleagues are busy all day long, and there is only one thing that can instantly bring the members of the whole company together - the casting interview of the male number one, which is called casting in the industry. No matter what type of work you do in the film and television industry, you are full of interest in casting. Zhang Xiaotu is the casting director of a short drama company, and when she heard this joke, she smiled and said: "When casting, people from all over the company will come to the conference room, and I never thought that there were so many people in our company, more than in a meeting." She told me that you must have seen similar scenes, just like the drama of the emperor's selection of concubines in the TV series "The Legend of Zhen Huan". When the group news of a short drama is released, the candidates will first submit their resumes, and the casting director will conduct a round of preliminary screening according to ** and personal information, and finally 20-30 candidates will be produced to enter the interview, at this time, casting officially begins. After the candidates enter the venue, introduce themselves with PPT, and then turn around 45 degrees to show themselves to the director in different static and dynamic ways. After the explosion of the short drama industry, Zhang Xiaotu's workload has also increased exponentially, starting from the second half of the year, a project can receive thousands of resumes, and in order to screen actors, he often works overtime all night. But in the eyes of other colleagues, even overtime is a "sweet burden". Zhang Xiaotu said that the burden on his shoulders is very heavy, if the actors can't even conquer the casting directors, how can the audience fall?She revealed that the background data monitoring of the short drama is very perfect, and you can clearly see the ** amount per minute, if the data of the male and female protagonists is crazy when they appear, it is a failure of casting. "In fact, there are many factors that determine appearance, such as makeup, lighting and shooting images. But if the data is not good, we will change people, and this industry is so cruel and real. She said helplessly. In addition to appearance, the key factor that determines the life and death of a short drama is the plot. Zhang Xiaotu said: "On the track of women's frequency short dramas, sweet pets are always the mainstream. No one will always like Mr. Ba, but everyone will have a stage of liking Mr. Ba, maybe when they are tired of life, they want to dream when they are tired. Even if it is a 10,000-year-old stalk, as long as the lines are bursting, the characters are pleasing, and the shooting is innovative, it can still make girls roll and kick their legs on the bed wrapped in quilts. "Many practitioners said to the Hedgehog Commune,Short dramas are the same as online texts, there are thousands of gullies between male and female frequencies, and it is never possible to understand each other, because they have different flattering objects. An Lei lives in Shanghai and works as a clerical worker in a company, and her concentrated ** small short drama has been since June this year, and there are about 20 short dramas that have been chased after one episode, and there are six paid ** short dramas, most of which are small program short dramas. The unpaid short dramas are mainly on the Kuaishou platform, and you can basically watch the full episode for free. She firmly stated that she would never pay for themes that disrespect women, such as brainless abuse of the heroine, smoking the heroine's blood, forcibly possessing after adoption, and asking the heroine to do **. On the male frequency track, short dramas related to the God of War and the Dragon King's son-in-law dominated, and Locke, a short drama user, said: "The two most popular contents of male frequency are counterattack and pretending to be a pig and eating a tiger, and almost all stories can be divided into these two types." Locke, a coder at a company in Beijing, believes that no one wants to explore grand propositions or watch trivial daily life in short dramas, but like short dramas that are not grounded and anti-common sense, in short, the farther away from real life, the better. The emotional needs of people in literary works are nothing more than the four dimensions of catharsis, projection, resonance and identity, and short dramas can be achieved in the first two dimensions, which also firmly grasps human nature. In the process of dialogue between Hedgehog Commune and short drama users, it was found that there is a certain attribution fallacy in the current interpretation of short drama payment. That is, when something is successful, the analyst will always overestimate its value. For example, many people attribute the success of short dramas to plot reversals, character designs, and card point payments, but there is another point that is often overlooked - the investment of user sunk costs. A number of users said: "Since you spend money, you must see a result, although it often ends in disappointment, but never spend half of the money stuck in the middle, that is too uncomfortable." To sum up, short drama users often stay for their appearance and pay for the plot, and the real reason why they keep paying to watch it is the investment of sunk costs, which also makes most short drama users have inertia when making decisions. Perhaps, as Evan said, the goal of short dramas that want to make quick money and step on the wind has never been "high-quality". Previously, he also produced 80 high score short drama, but the number of scoring is only more than 100 people. After filming this drama, Evan left his job and the company was dissolved. Since then, he has been convinced that the model of applause is destined to not be able to live for a long time. On the evening of November 29, Pinduoduo once became the largest Chinese concept stock in the United States, and many people attributed Pinduoduo's success to attracting a large number of consumers "outside the fifth ring", calling it a "victory in the sinking market". In fact, low prices are a broader market, and this market should be considered more mainstream. The same is true for short dramas, which have long had a relatively fixed audience and formed a relatively stable cultural preference. The Hedgehog Commune once talked about the topic of skits with the courier brother and the takeaway brother, although most of them have watched it, but when it comes to the step of jumping to the mini program, they usually quit the app in a panic because they are afraid that their mobile phones will be controlled by the "virus". In addition, it is difficult for them to distinguish which ones are short dramas, whether they are platform short dramas or small program short dramas, whether they are horizontal or vertical, whether they are ** slices or self-made short dramas. None of this matters to them, but anything that is about a minute long is collectively referred to as a "skit". In the process of waiting for pickup, the courier brother Zhongcheng can brush several "short dramas", the storm of short dramas in the outside world has nothing to do with him, he doesn't care about the excitement and glory of the short dramas, but when asked what short dramas to watch, he hesitated and didn't want to answer: "Don't ask, I'm embarrassed." (At the request of the interviewee, all names have been changed).