In 2020, Quibi, an app known as a short version of Netflix, entered the public eye.
With nearly 1.8 billion financing, the participation of industry leaders, and the blank market of "boutique short dramas", Quibi is nicknamed a product that is "born with a golden spoon".
According to **, Quibi's marketing budget in the first half of 2020 exceeded 1$200 million, which even includes lavish advertising breaks at the Super Bowl and Academy Awards.
After the release at the end of April, the number of quibi ** dropped rapidly from 300,000 on the first day to below 100,000, and into June, the average daily ** volume could not even maintain a low level of 10,000.
In 2023, the unfinished business of boutique will be sunk and continued.
ReelShort, a live-action skit app launched by Crazy Maple Studio, an overseas subsidiary of domestic digital publishing company Chinese**, has soared in popularity in the North American market, and has even been called the next TikTok.
According to the mobile data analytics platform "Diandiandata", on November 12, ReelShort jumped to the top of the list of free iOS entertainment apps in the United StatesAs of December 6, it is ranked 18th.
The popularity of short dramas is staged simultaneously at home and abroad, and the scripts are similar to the cool text routines, and the composition of the two industrial chains is basically the same: upstream content creation, midstream content shooting, and downstream content distribution.
However, at present, most of the opportunities observed in China to go overseas are at the upstream content creation level, and the experience of online articles can be inherited.
In order to raise money for my sick mother's medical expenses, I agreed to my stepmother's request to marry a notorious gentleman instead of my stepsister. ”
The above plot is from Reelshort's hit short series, "The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband".
From the platform's existing inventory of short dramas, we can extract some plot keywords: domineering president, werewolf, vampire. If you have some understanding of the online literature industry, it is not difficult to find that these are common themes for online articles going overseas.
*：reelshort）The online text that took the lead in going to sea has become the main text of the current short drama that goes to sea**.
According to data released by the Online Literature Center of the China Writers Association, by the end of 2022, the overseas market size of online literature exceeded 3 billion yuan, with a total of more than 16,000 online literary works exported overseas, and more than 1 overseas users500 million people in more than 200 countries and regions around the world.
According to the list of short drama apps that have been launched in overseas markets compiled by Appgrowing, it can be seen that many apps have "online text backgrounds", and the rich library can provide IP resources for their cross-border short dramas, and the direct adaptation of scripts from popular books can also reduce the cost of trial and error to a certain extent.
In addition to adapting existing online texts, the production method of original scripts also follows the experience of going overseas online texts. According to practitioners, there are roughly two kinds of script creation for overseas short dramas, one is that domestic authors export Chinese scripts according to the themes specified by the editors, and then translate and localize, and the other is for editors to check the story outline and let overseas authors directly export English scripts.
The core of both creative paths is "editorial checks", the editor decides the theme, outline, character design, and story direction according to market preferences, and the author will have a set of quantitative indicators, such as the plot needs to be reversed within the specified number of words, and how to integrate the specified elements and popular characters into the narrative.
The text and the short ** are presented in different forms, but they carry the same story core. The domestic online literature industry has promoted the birth of "database writing", finding common "cool points" in the huge amount of reader feedback data, and selecting elements and characters to arrange and combine to meet different reading needs.
The online article has proven the similarity of global consumers in terms of taste, and this kind of plot design, which is regarded as "dog blood" and "earthy flavor" by the mainstream, coupled with the expressiveness of short **, is enough to make it a very attractive entertainment pastime.
Another advantage of domestic manufacturers is that there is a certain "time gap" between overseas story consumption and domestic ones. The online literature industry, including social **, has some similar ridicule for overseas products, "domestic texts that can't run out of data have a chance to become popular overseas", "What is popular in Europe and the United States now is what was popular in Jinjiang ten years ago".
Based on the huge audience, the iteration speed of domestic content consumption is extremely fast, and the "cool points" and "explosive points" output of online articles and short dramas come from the experience summarized through countless feedback screening and data testing.
*:reelshort) This set of experience can be directly appropriated at this stage, so we can see some familiar Chinese expressions in popular overseas short dramas. The content section of the reelsshort official website "love after marriage" is a simple translation of the old Chinese meme "love after marriage", and many of the dialogues in the play have the unique sense of drama and virality of Chinese-style cool dramas, and there is also the shadow of text translation.
There are relatively sufficient IPs for overseas short dramas, but there are still some uncertainties in the industry when it comes to the process of film and television and monetization.
*: Pacific Research Institute)."Abundance and thrift are made by people. ”This is the evaluation of Liu Wen (pseudonym), a practitioner of short dramas going overseas, on the production process.
At present, there are three main ways to produce short dramas: shooting and production in China;Filming overseas and post-production in China;Completely hire a team of expatriates. Liu Wen is also a crossover from overseas online literature to short dramas, and her team is mainly responsible for content creation and shooting, and the finished products are purchased by the platform and put into the market.
The biggest cost is in the shooting, a short drama has 60 episodes, and each episode is about 1 minute long. The production cost in the United States is about 10-200,000 US dollars, while in China the production can be pushed to 100,000 yuan. ”
Liu Wen told Ginkgo Technology that the biggest problem in domestic production is that it can't find professional actors, so it can basically only hire foreign models.
In order to balance cost and quality, Liu Wen's team is currently filming in Thailand, "The script is finalized for half a month in the early stage, 1 week is prepared, 10 days of shooting, and 20 days in the later stage, and it takes about two months for a drama to be completed from project approval to finished product." ”
The production cost is still under control, and there may be more unknowns in the distribution process. "Counting the cost of streaming, it's hard to say whether you can make money," Liu Wen said.
Taking the distribution of domestic short dramas as a reference, according to China News Weekly, in the overall cost investment of short dramas, the budget for operation and streaming is far greater than the budget for content production. Almost all micro-short dramas will spend 80 -90% of their limited costs on streaming, and a hit like "Wushuang" spent more than 80 million yuan on streaming alone. According to the data disclosed by ByteDance, the recharge turnover of the micro-short drama industry in 2023 will reach about 18.3 billion.
Chinese** CEO Jia Yi also talked about the challenges of content distribution in an interview with the Independent Overseas Consortium in April this year. "A story may be really good, but what kind of users do you push to?".And how do you get the right story to the right user?”
Compared with traditional film and television dramas, the information flow product attributes of short dramas make them highly dependent on streaming and strive to be "seen" by consumers. According to the data monitoring of Appgrowing International, Reelshort began to buy on a large scale in July, with an average daily double-end delivery volume of more than 400 groups, and after October, the tide rose even higher, and the single-day delivery volume once exceeded 1,000 groups.
Compared to the average domestic one, it will be online 2The efficiency of 7 micro-short dramas, the inventory of the head reelshort is still in double digits, and the content reserves of overseas manufacturers are in urgent need of expansion. Investing heavily in customer acquisition may be able to achieve quick results, but there is still a long way to go in terms of follow-up retention.
The so-called sinking entertainment mostly refers to the fact that this kind of pastime is almost "at your fingertips", and instant gratification can be obtained at a small cost.
The market generally regarded the rise of TikTok as an important reason for the fall of Quibi, and at that time, Quibi adhered to the paid boutique route, which was naturally inferior to TikTok, which fully embraced Generation Z and encouraged sharing and fragmented consumption. Skit apps that are now thriving on the same track also have to face competition from TikTok.
Short dramas and short ** both have the attributes of information flow products, there is no clear boundary, and the consumption minds of the two are also very close, both in order to obtain audio-visual sensory stimulation and short-term instant gratification. This means that skit apps are reaching the same audience as TikTok.
The most obvious advantage of TikTok is that it is free. ReelShort's pricing isn't cheap, and in-app content is unlocked solely by paying for it.15For $99, you can watch about 60 short episodes, which is the length of a movie at most, but it's a lot more expensive than a movie ticket. In addition, TikTok also has a fairly rich content supply, taking popular movie slices as an example, in order to comply with the consumption trend of short content, Paramount recently uploaded 23 clips of its well-known movie "Mean Girl" to TikTok.
When well-made film and television dramas also begin to be output in a fragmented way, and they are free, is the exclusive content of short dramas still cost-effective for entertainment?I'm afraid it's hard to draw conclusions. If manufacturers move towards the direction of volume production and volume cost like the trend of domestic short dramas, the investment logic of low cost and high return in the industry will be affected, not to mention that overseas production costs are more difficult to control than domestic ones.
2023 is a big year for going overseas, and e-commerce, logistics, games, and short dramas have all regarded overseas as a growth engine, among which "sinking" is a key word that is being mentioned in various industries. The tuyere of going to sea short drama proves that the universality of sinking demand is not only reflected in **, the emotional resonance of "cool" and "exciting" is common to all mankind, but from the current development, short drama has just completed a stage of demand insight, similar to all overseas industries, and it has to find a long-term way in the "localization" test.