"Pay attention, this woman's name is Xiaomei, after three years of marriage, when she was pregnant, she was pulled by her scumbag husband again to give a blood transfusion to the scheming Bai Yueguang, and then she was ruthlessly abandoned;This little fresh meat is called Xiaoshuai, who appeared by Xiaomei's side when she was sad and sad, and launched a fanatical pursuit;At this time, the ex-husband found out the identity of Xiaomei's rich second generation and tried to save the ......”
The familiar setting, the familiar plot direction, the familiar reversal in less than two minutes, the familiar episode after episode makes people can't stop the coolness, but it has a completely unfamiliar "face" - the scenes are all in Europe and the United States, the actors are all white faces who speak pure English, and most of the viewers who watch the drama are from the American market.
In recent months, the 55-episode, two-minute episode short drama "Never Divorce a Secret Billionaire Heiress" has exploded in the United States. There are also many short dramas that are also out of the circle in North America, including werewolves, vampires, wealthy sadomasochism, etc., but the core is very unified, all of which are love stories of "the domineering president falls in love with me".
Surprisingly, the driving force behind these seemingly authentic European and American skits is actually a Chinese company. ReelShort, which publishes these short dramas, is a short drama app developed by Crazy Maple Studio, a subsidiary of the domestic digital publishing company Chinese**, mainly for the US market.
Top row left to right: posters for the short plays "Never Divorce the Secret Billionaire Heir", "Fated My Taboo Alpha", "After Being Killed by My Husband, I Was Reborn and Won the Super Ball Award", and "How My Boss Became My Husband".
With the popularity of these tyrant short dramas, since July this year, Reelshort's app store rankings in many countries and regions have also soared. As of November 11, Reelshort has successfully ranked among the top three in the App Store (Apple App Store) in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, becoming a dark horse app that overshadows TikTok for a while. According to the statistics of the data analysis platform AppFigures, the number of ** in the first 17 days of November has exceeded 1.9 million, and the cumulative ** volume has exceeded 11 million.
Reelshort's overseas nugget ability is also surprising, according to foreign media TechCrunch, on November 11, its net income after deducting payment for app store fees was 4590,000 US dollars, about 3.28 million yuan, as of November 17, the cumulative net income has exceeded 22 million US dollars, about 1600 million yuan.
This even made A-shares shocked, giving birth to a group of popular "short drama concept stocks", Chinese **, palm reading technology, Shanghai film, Yuanwang technology and other nearly 10 ** ushered in the rise and fall. As of November 24**, this month, the market value of Chinese** has soared by 14.6 billion yuan.
reelshort homepage.
It turns out that the whole world is eating the whole world", and it also makes more people see the hope of replicating the myth of getting rich overseas in the domestic short drama "8 days to recharge and break 100 million".
At present, the monthly recharge in the overseas market is about 10 million US dollars. Liu Jinlong, head of Kyushu Culture's overseas business, told China News Weekly, "If we stand in 3 or 5 years, we judge that the global short drama market can achieve a market size of more than 10 billion US dollars." ”
Since the second half of this year, Chinese short dramas have been drifting more violently to the other side of the ocean. A number of domestic film and television production-related practitioners told China News Weekly that in recent times, many different types of players have been actively approaching the door to communicate the needs of creating overseas short dramas. Including domestic small program drama distributors, long-term ** platforms, film and television companies, online text platforms, social platforms, game manufacturers, etc., are all flocking to it;In terms of overseas destinations, the North American market is becoming a new battleground, and Southeast Asia and the Middle East have also become hot spots for many players to try to exploit.
This war, which was originally regarded as a "war outside the fifth ring road", is accelerating its global spread.
When Long Aotian transforms into Sebastian
Accidentally. "When it comes to the performance of Chinese-style boss short dramas that have exploded overseas, the first reaction of many practitioners in the film and television industry is basically the same.
After all, since its launch in August last year, Reelshort has tried to ship short dramas with high domestic production and soaring recharge income to the sea. But these short dramas in China that people can't help but keep charging money and are always cool, whether it is the male-oriented "God of War + Son-in-law", or the female-oriented "Overlord + Sadomasochism" theme, after hanging English subtitles, they did not cause any splash.
But Reelshort didn't stop there. According to Zhang Yi, CEO and chief analyst of iiMedia Consulting, at the end of last year, the Silicon Valley-based Reelshort team began to try a more localized production method, using overseas filming teams and using European and American actors, while retaining the core of China's popular short drama theme, combined with werewolves, vampires and other themes that European and American audiences are more familiar with, so as to create more localized short dramas.
As a result, in the Chinese short drama, "Long Aotian began to become Sebastian and Jackson", and "Leng Bingning became Selena and Alia", in the setting of more European and American style, he continued to complete the two-way rush with sweetness and abuse again and again.
The European-American "earthy" short dramas that have been localized and packaged and each episode is less than 2 minutes have indeed attracted more and more local users in the following six months through the promotion of social ** platforms such as TikTok and Facebook.
Take Reelshort's hit short drama "Fated to My Forbidden Alpha" at the top of TikTok's homepage as an example, the first 20 episodes of the show released on TikTok have received more than 60 million **, and the highest ** volume of a single episode has exceeded 30 million;There is no shortage of praise in the comment area, such as "I want to watch more" and "I feel like I am watching "Twilight", and many people are chasing after them to ask if they can watch the full episode in **.
And following the official guidance in the comment area, the audience who wants to know how the heroine will become stronger after the beginning**, how to distinguish the true destiny, and talk about a vigorous love with her naturally chooses **app, and then begins to unlock the remaining 59 episodes except for the trailer and the first episode by watching ads or paying - even if you have watched 20 episodes on TikTok, you can only unlock episode by episode from episode 2. Judging from Reelshort's detail page, the show has accumulated more than 100 million times on the app.
After running through the mode, Reelshort launched more short dramas around the four themes of "Love After Marriage", "Falling for the Alpha", "Sweet Revenge" and "Dating My Boss", and more hits were born one after another.
With the birth of popular short dramas going overseas, the gold-absorbing grand occasion of domestic short dramas has also begun to reproduce in the reelshort app. It can be seen from some comments that overseas audiences are also complaining about the cliché of the plot, and at the same time, they can't help but spend money to unlock it - after all, after just watching the heroine, she was slapped by the vicious female partner, and she was so angry that she had to "continue to spend money to watch the drama" to unravel her confusion.
AppFigures data shows that ReelShort generates an average of about $2 in revenue per user**. Specifically, according to incomplete statistics from "China News Weekly", the price of a single episode of its short drama is 50 80 recharge coins, and the number of episodes is generally around 50 60 episodes, according to the recharge rules, it often costs nearly $20 or more to chase a drama, which is 15 more than Netflix standard members$49 per month** is even higher.
Above: The short play "Dangerous Contract: Let Me Go, Mr."CEO" at the start-up site in Malaysia. Figure: Shanghai Fanku Media.
Bottom left, bottom right: The filming site of an overseas skit produced by a Chinese company. Figure Kyushu culture.
By July of this year, Reelshort ushered in its first peak with this style of play. According to analytics platform SensorTower, in July this year, ReelShort had a total of 1.9 million visits on Google Play and the App Store, with a monthly turnover of $6 million — which means an average of $1.4 million in daily paid revenue.
Although it cannot be compared with the average daily recharge consumption of 60 million yuan in paid short dramas on all platforms in China, the rise of Reelshort at this stage still makes many practitioners "wake up" - it turns out that it is not that the boss has no overseas attraction, but needs to be changed. The psychological needs of audiences in various countries for cool dramas are relatively similar, and if you want to succeed in going overseas, you need to be more in tune with the local atmosphere of Europe and the United States. Niu Jing, a producer at a film and television company in Beijing, told China News Weekly.
In the final analysis, being able to have a sense of substitution and heartily to have a dream that cannot be realized in reality is becoming an increasingly generalized commonality for global audiences. Nowadays, in addition to the "domineering president takes all the world", the theme preference of different regions for overseas short dramas has been revealed. For example, European and American audiences also prefer high-dramatic, high-visual impact works such as werewolves and vampires, the Middle East likes cool dramas, and Southeast Asia prefers sweet pets and sadomasochism.
In Zhang Yi's view, the essence of short dramas is to meet people's spiritual and cultural needs, but to meet people's immediate and fragmented entertainment needs in a low-cost way, and it has the ability to cross social status, class and country. At the same time, with the increase of work pressure, this demand is generally becoming more and more obvious.
Because of this, the short drama with a Chinese core has exploded overseas, which coincides with what TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi said in an exclusive interview with the founder of TED, that the short ** "The work can resonate with people, and it will naturally become popular".
However, in the local market of Europe and the United States, the content form of short dramas can be described as a blank. And blank space means opportunity.
It's time for the skit to go to sea
The wind that goes to sea for the skit is not blown out of thin air. Many interviewees believe that now, Chinese short dramas have many basic conditions for going overseas.
On the one hand, although it has not been born for a long time, the domestic short drama market has gradually matured. "After many Internet companies have reached a certain stage of development in China, they will naturally quickly copy this business model overseas. Liu Jinlong told China News Weekly.
Since the end of 2020, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television added the "online micro-short drama" section to the filing system, the domestic short drama market has entered a period of rapid development, the industrial chain and its industrialized and process-based collaborative production model have been relatively mature, and the business model has also been verified by the market - this is also the origin of the myth that short dramas have become "shot in one week, over 100 million in eight days".
The domestic short drama market is also growing with a breaking trend. According to a report by iiMedia Consulting, the size of China's micro-short drama market is expected to reach 373 in 2023900 million yuan, an increase of 267 percent year-on-year65％。Zhang Yi believes that in the context of the general similarity of the spiritual life pursued by people, short dramas can work in the domestic market of 1.4 billion people, and there is a high probability that they can work in the worldMoreover, even if overseas players have corresponding layouts, domestic short drama-related practitioners have more advantages in cost efficiency.
Skits do require a lot of manpower, time and energy to make, and the Chinese team is indeed much more competitive in this regard. Chen Xiufeng, co-founder and chief producer of Shanghai Fanku Culture Media, also said.
On the other hand, short dramas are essentially shortened products of the Internet. In the past 20 years, a large number of overseas audiences have cultivated their preferences for bosses, sadomasochism, fantasy, Xiuzhen, Xianxia and other types of networks, laying an audience foundation for short dramas, and at the same time providing a rich and market-proven IP source reserve for short dramasSince then, TikTok has continued to expand its territory, allowing the world to open up the era of short dramas one after another, providing a more direct infrastructure for the promotion and transformation of short dramas.
The filming scene of the short drama "Revenge After Divorce: The Secret Heiress". Figure Kyushu culture.
Since the beginning of this year, the "volume" of the domestic short drama market has accelerated the pace of short drama practitioners going overseas. "In the past, when the main creative team such as screenwriters, actors, and directors didn't work, it was very low, but now there are more projects, and everyone's ** is also rising. Chen Xiufeng introduced. At the same time, the audience of short dramas has higher and higher requirements for production, which also makes the production cost of domestic short dramas continue to rise, "In the male frequency category, the cost of many short dramas with a collective volume of 100 million yuan has reached the level of one million yuan, and the cost of female costume dramas has also risen to 600,000 800,000 yuan, and the cost of modern dramas is at least about 400,000 yuan."
A staff member of a mini program drama distributor who did not want to be named said that coupled with the rising cost of streaming (i.e., advertising), platforms such as Douyin and WeChat have also begun to increase channel fees, leaving less and less profit margins for short drama companies.
Li Tao, the producer of the popular short drama "Wushuang" and the founder of Xi'an Fengxing Company, which set a record for short drama recharge this year, once calculated an account for **: "Mini program short dramas rely heavily on investment expenditure, according to the industry's average ROI (return on investment) standard of 12 to calculate, assuming that the investment flow is 100 million yuan, its profit does not exceed 20 million yuan, which also includes manpower and shooting costs. After deduction, the net profit is about several million yuan, and then it will be shared by upstream and downstream participants such as the mini program platform and the manufacturer. ”
At the same time, with the continuous upgrading of the supervision and governance of the industry by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, domestic short dramas also need to embark on the road of high-quality and innovation, and the barbaric growth of the past will no longer exist, and the choice of themes will also be greatly limited.
Under the interweaving of all kinds of anxieties, facing the blue ocean market, the craze of short dramas going overseas has now surged.
When she went to Hengdian in October this year to survey the location, Niu Jing found that Hengdian was building a European-American style live studio, and a staff member of the Shanghai European and American studio also introduced that its European and American studios were welcoming more short drama crews with foreign actors. It can also be observed from social ** platforms such as Xiaohongshu that a number of overseas Chinese shooting teams in the United States, the United Kingdom and other Western countries have opened accounts to show their own shooting cases, and look forward to cooperating with domestic platforms to go overseas for short drama projects.
A number of domestic film and television production practitioners told China News Weekly that in the past six months, there have been many platforms to select topics and scripts for short dramas going overseas, and companies have been invited to carry out filming and production, and the basic themes are related to women's love. A short drama producer in the United States posted on social ** that he has been communicating with Party A's platform every day for half a year, and the filming schedule has been full, without a day off.
Some platforms are already slowly on the track, some may still be just making apps, and some will be launched soon. After chatting with multiple platforms about overseas cooperation, Chen Xiufeng concluded, "It is certain that there will be more and more platforms going overseas, and everyone's enthusiasm is very high."
Outside the short drama platform, more and more different types of players are joining the army of short dramas going overseas. According to Liu Jinlong, at present, companies in different fields, including iQiyi, Youku, Tencent**, Lemon Pictures, Huace Film and Television, and even Alipay, have short dramas related to going overseas, or are developing overseas short drama apps, or contacting overseas teams to prepare for filming.
According to incomplete statistics from China News Weekly, since the beginning of this year, a number of domestically made short drama apps such as GoodShort, a short drama application of the online text platform Xinyue Times, Moboreels of Changyue Technology, Mini Episode of the social platform Chizicheng, and 99TV and ShortTV of Kyushu Culture, a domestic mini program drama platform, have been launched overseas.
Rebuild the localization assembly line
At present, most short drama platforms that go overseas are taking the North American market as their main position to go overseas.
On the one hand, the themes that domestic short dramas are good at have been recognized by North American users, and there is more room for play from the perspective of content;On the other hand, "many platforms have found that the payment effect in the US market will be better after testing in small batches". In the process of communicating with the platform, Chen Xiufeng learned that the success of Reelshort can also be used as a verification.
This logic is not difficult to understand. "With the same investment, team size and cycle, the input-output ratio in the North American market will be higher, and short dramas similar to American dramas are themselves a product of globalization and can be distributed to any region in the world and cover global users. Liu Jinlong explained, "At the same time, for this group of people going to sea, of course, we also hope that our content and model can occupy a place in a cultural and capital highland with Netflix and Disney." ”
Of course, this does not mean that there are no opportunities for gold outside the North American market, and Southeast Asia, which is more similar to Chinese culture, and the Middle East, where user income is higher, are also becoming hot spots for domestic players.
The filming site of an overseas skit produced by a Chinese company. Figure Kyushu culture.
According to Liu Jinlong, countries in the Middle East have higher incomes, and women in a disadvantaged position of social rights are more eager to get ** in love-themed content, so domestic female frequency content is also generally welcomed by users in the region, and the competition is not as fierce as North America and Southeast AsiaIn Southeast Asia, although the paid income is limited, the input cost is relatively low, and the cultural similarity may also attract higher traffic, which can be monetized through traffic.
For different markets, short dramas have derived different models. Taking Kyushu culture as an example, its shorttv is mainly oriented to the English market, and short dramas are mainly divided into two types: one is to translate and produce domestic short dramas suitable for the European and American markets through translation and re-dubbing on the platform, "Originally, everyone may feel that it will be difficult for Chinese film and television drama content to enter the European and American markets, but in fact, now our (translation) short dramas have obtained very good paid data." Liu Jinlong said.
The second type is to purchase suitable ** IP for the European and American markets, and the script adaptation by its own and cooperative screenwriter teams, and after the script is finalized, contact the local team in the United States, Europe, Australia, Malaysia and other overseas countries to carry out the shooting and production, which is also the more mainstream way for the short drama platform to go overseas for the European and American markets, such as ReelShort, GoodShort, etc.
In addition, there is also a category customized for Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and overseas Chinese. Kyushu Culture's short dramas for global Chinese in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Southeast Asia are mainly launched on the app 99TV, which basically adds traditional subtitles to domestic short dramas.
Niu Jing's three overseas short drama projects that are about to start are filmed on the set in the European and American style in China and looking for foreign actors to shoot in China. Although this method is not as strong as overseas filming in terms of localization, it is stronger than translated short dramas;The production cost is higher and the cycle is longer than that of translated short dramas, but it is more controllable than overseas shooting.
Liu Jinlong introduced that the current production cost of ShortTV's overseas short dramas starts at $150,000. According to the Xiaguang Agency, the production budget of a short drama in Reelshort can reach $200,000. In Niu Jing's calculations, the cost of the short drama that will start filming in Shanghai is about $120,000.
In addition to the above three methods, some AI technology companies are also entering the short drama overseas track, providing short drama platforms and producers with AI capabilities such as script development, short drama face swapping - replacing Asian faces with European and American faces, intelligent dubbing, and dynamic lip shape adaptation. "We are now working with several technical teams to run in the integration and application of AI in film and television, trying to see if we can directly adjust some of the short dramas we already have and move them overseas, which will be more efficient and save a lot of costs. Chen Xiufeng said.
Same as domestic short dramas, overseas short dramas are currently mainly promoted by streaming, with the only difference being that the delivery platform is switched to Facebook, TikTok, Google search, YouTube, etc. "At present, the cost of overseas customer acquisition for the entire industry is about 5 US dollars, which is lower than the cost of 100 200 yuan for a paying user in China. Liu Jinlong told China News Weekly.
In terms of business model, the current short drama apps that go overseas generally rely on two major revenues: payment and advertising, and the proportion of the two is quite different in different countries and regions.
According to Liu Jinlong, in countries with strong user payment ability such as the United States, the pricing of a single episode of short dramas on the ShortTV platform is generally 0Around $3;In Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia, the pricing of a single episode is reduced to 0about 1 dollar, and push more activities unlocked by watching ads, so as to "let more users with weak payment ability also watch more dramas".
In addition to these two mainstream business models, Goodshort has also tried a subscription system, and public information shows that its membership fee starts from 9999 USD 399Ranging from $99.
Can the "get-rich-quick myth" be replicated
With the acceptance of this form of short drama by overseas audiences, the ability to pay in different regions has been verified, does it mean that the "myth of getting rich" of domestic short dramas can be replicated overseas?
At this early stage, there are still a number of challenges facing players who are actively going global.
From the perspective of content supply, the form of overseas local shooting of short dramas is constantly increasing the production cost and cycle. On the one hand, how to calibrate the script of the overseas short drama as the source is more localized. According to Liu Jinlong, at present, Kyushu Culture has re-recruited a group of screenwriters for the overseas project, basically all of whom require a background in studying abroad, familiar with the European and American markets, and strong screenwriting ability, or high-quality editors in the process of going overseas for online articles. After the initial adaptation of the overseas **IP, these editors also need to work with the directors and screenwriters of the overseas production team to polish the cultural differences, colloquialism and other details of the script, which currently takes two or three months.
In the filming process, whether it is filming overseas or domestically, "the unit price of foreign actors will be much higher, and foreign actors generally can only accept 8 12 hours a day, and the previous domestic short drama crews were about fifteen or sixteen hours a day. Chen Xiufeng introduced.
Users in overseas markets attach great importance to light and shadow effects, so we use a film production team in the overseas short drama project, and strive to be close to the picture quality of European and American film and television dramas." Niu Jing also mentioned that the production cost of this form of overseas short drama is more than three times that of domestic short dramas, and the shooting cycle takes 10 to 15 days, while domestic short dramas with a volume of 100 groups are generally filmed in about a week.
All of the above issues will directly affect the frequency and sustainability of the platform's content supply. According to public information, at present, Reelshort updates two short dramas about a month, and there are only more than 20 short dramas in reserve on the entire platform;ShortTV currently updates 3 5 short dramas filmed overseas every month, and has a total of 10 updates so far. According to Detaven's "Micro Short Drama Market Report for the First Half of 2023", a total of 481 new short dramas will be released in China in the first half of 2023, and the number of short dramas going overseas at this stage is much less.
Under the low update frequency, in the face of changing user needs all the time, it may not be so easy for short drama players to frequently bet on the cool points of audiences with unfamiliar cultural backgrounds and create more popular short dramas. Whether this will affect customer acquisition, the long-term payment performance of overseas users, and whether the platform can significantly improve its content supply capacity as the production model and market of overseas short dramas become more and more mature, various challenges are imminent.
What directly affects the monetization ability is that it still needs time to test the efficiency of the casting efficiency of overseas short dramas.
At present, after the short drama overseas platform publishes advertising materials on Facebook, TikTok and other social platforms, it is necessary to guide users to jump to the app store**app, and then enter the app to register and log in to pay**, the intermediate link is longer, which will lead to more traffic loss.
At present, although the cost of overseas customer acquisition is lower than that in China, according to Liu Jinlong, domestic short dramas can be directly reflected in the recharge income on the same day, but if you do an independent app overseas, you can't directly see the income feedback brought by the stream on the same day, "Maybe if an overseas drama wants to sell $1 million at the box office, it needs to go through a week, two weeks, or even a month of promotion." From the perspective of ROI (return on investment), this will inevitably mean that there are higher requirements for users' ability to continue to pay. These two are together constituting a hidden worry on the road to the realization of short dramas going overseas.
In addition to the ability to monetize, problems such as the difference in the degree of copyright protection at home and abroad, the difference in the convenience of payment, etc., are also what players who have to face and overcome one by one. At the same time, players including mini program drama platforms, social platforms and other types of players also have to face the competition situation of online literature platforms with richer upstream IP accumulation and higher posture.
Can short dramas go overseas become a new and good business to make money?Standing in the present, no one can answer this question. As Chen Xiufeng said, "Everything about going overseas short dramas is still in its infancy, and it is still in the exploration stage." The only thing that is certain is that those who have been, are and are about to enter the game believe in the vastness of the space for short dramas to go to sea.
Issued in 202312.4. The 1119th issue of China News Weekly.
Magazine title: "The boss" short drama is going to sea.
Reporter: Shi Hanxu.