Text: Li Wei. Editor's note:
I knew that the skit was hot, but I didn't expect it to be so popular.
In 2021, it will still be a niche topic in the Shuangwen circle, and a year later, this kind of micro-short drama that is indiscriminately used in the Internet ** suddenly swept the country in the sinking market and successfully went to sea; Nowadays, short dramas have become a phenomenal existence that film and television media, advertising and marketing, and financial circles are vying to face.
Questioning skits and understanding skits may not be long before many of us will gradually become supporters of skits as we did with Pinduoduo consumers, right?
What is a skit? In the face of this problem, in the business school class where the author teaches, a small number of students whose business has stood in the wind have bright eyes and can't hold back their excitement, while most of them are full of doubts and puzzles.
This situation also appeared not long ago (January 29) under the news that Douyin announced that it had reached an exclusive boutique micro-short drama cooperation with Stephen Chow, and there were two completely different voices in the comment area: some people expect the former king of comedy to bring good works and good content to the short drama market; Other people are worried, is the star coming to the new track to make money, beware of the night is not guaranteed.
I happened to meet two alumni in the industry recently and chatted with them.
One is an executive of a state-owned listed film and television production company in a major entertainment province.
She said, Professor Li, do you know how popular skits are now? In the past year, China has produced more than 3,000 online micro-short dramas, and the market size has reached 37 billion.
What is this concept? In 2023, the annual box office of Chinese films will only be 54.9 billion, and the rise of short dramas will only be three or five years, which shows that the track is thriving.
The other is the backbone of a short drama team, who has been transferred from the film and television industry to short dramas for less than 2 years, and is already a veteran in the industry.
She said that low is low, and short dramas are the spiritual consumer goods needed by the sinking market.
Flowers" is good, but an episode is 45 minutes, how many security guards and delivery people have time to watch it, and how many people understand it? ”
I think so. Let's talk about the short drama below, and I hope my observations and thoughts can bring you some inspiration.
The earliest time I paid attention to the short drama was in June 2022. A friend who teaches playwriting at the Shanghai Theater Academy said that he was originally worried about the employment of students, but as soon as Shanghai opened up, they all went out to shoot short **.
At first, I thought it was all kinds of small ** on the online platform, but he said that they were two different things, they went out to shoot a short drama.
First of all, a short drama is a drama, and it is an IP story; Secondly, the short drama is super short, ranging from tens of seconds to one minute per episode, and only three or five minutes long.
This kind of drama is usually on a mobile phone applet or a short **app**, the first ten episodes are free, and then they are charged by the episode, and it costs hundreds of dollars to chase the whole drama.
Short dramas first appeared in the audience's field of vision around 2018, and gradually entered the regulatory system in 2020, and then ushered in a big explosion of the industry in 2022 with the help of platforms and technologies.
According to the data released by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the number of micro-short dramas recorded in 2021 will be 398, and the number of micro-short dramas will be close to 2,800 in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 600% (it is estimated that there will be more than 3,500 short dramas in 2023).
The eruption of supply has rapidly expanded the influence of short dramas, and more and more audiences have been radiated, and the emergence of some popular works has also made netizens addicted.
However, as a brand-new industry, short dramas have been changing rapidly and iterating, and there is no unified business model so far
It is no accident that the skit exploded in 2022. According to the data of enterprise checking, from 2019 to 2021, China's revocation and cancellation of film and television-related enterprises were 450,000, 4770,000, 5220,000 families, under the cold winter of film and television, a large number of actors, screenwriters and related practitioners are looking for a way out.
At the same time, driven by short platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili, domestic entertainment content and entertainment fragmentation have become a major trend.
The emergence of short dramas, on the one hand, has allowed part of the originally withered and excess production capacity of the film and television industry to find an export; On the other hand, the entry of film and television talents has also improved the content aesthetics and production capabilities of the short drama circle.
With the sharp increase in the number of productions, explosive products have also continued to come out of the circle, and the short drama market has also moved towards a boom in supply and demand.
In August 2023, "Wushuang", which has a production cost of less than 500,000 yuan, will be recharged more than 100 million yuan in one week after it was launched, becoming a phenomenal existence in the short drama industry, and also allowing the public to see the super gold attraction power of short dramas.
Later, more popular myths were reported by **, widely known: "Oops! "The Queen Mother Comes to Work" was launched within 24 hours, and the user recharge exceeded 12 million yuan; "After the flash marriage, Mr. Fu's vest can't be hidden" recharged more than 20 million yuan in 24 hours......
The myth of getting rich in short dramas has made many people who smell the smell of fast money come to the wind when they smell it, but curiosity also followsWho are the consumers of the skit and who is topping it up with krypton?
From the perspective of content, short dramas are divided into two categories: male frequency and female frequency. Most of the male frequency short dramas are about the boss, the god of war, and the son-in-law, and most of the stories they tell are counterattacks and revenge, and don't bully the poor teenagers, focusing on a "cool"; The female frequency focuses on sadomasochism, crossing, fantasy and other themes, and love after marriage and chasing wife crematoriums are the basic routines, highlighting a "pure".
From the production point of view, the quality of short dramas is mostly simple and coarse, not visually good, and the more prominent problem is serious plagiarism.
Take "Wushuang" as an example, because of the big explosion, there are endless imitation versions on the market, some of them have changed their male and female identities from male to female frequencies, and there are also ...... that simply change the identity of the male protagonist from a son-in-law to a courier brotherNot only are the lines highly similar in these dramas, but the texture of the scene props and popular shots is also the same.
The existence of these problems makes it difficult for short dramas to empathize with people with high incomes and high education. In other words, the middle class and elite people have higher requirements for spiritual consumption and have many choices, even if they watch short dramas, they can restrain the impulse of krypton.
The real consumer of short dramas is in the sinking market. According to the industry, the short-term audience is mainly young and middle-aged men aged 30-50 in the early stage, most of whom are engaged in takeaways, security guards, express delivery and other jobs, and have a certain amount of spending power, but time is fragmented, and they will not go to the theater or chase TV series at home; Later, with the blowout of the industry, users continued to radiate, and a large number of women also became loyal consumers.
In other words, the main body that pays for short dramas is the low-income group, although their income is not high, they are willing to pay for watching dramas.
Some people are puzzled by this, how can low-income people spend hundreds of yuan to watch a drama? This starts with the demographic structure of our country.
According to the results of the country's seventh national census, the total population of our country is about 14100 million, from the perspective of education structure, only 15 people have a university education47%。
Combined with the disclosure of the former prime minister at the press conference after the closing session of the third session of the 13th National People's Congress in May 2020, there are 600 million people in China whose per capita household income is less than 1,000 yuan.
It can be inferred from this that the low- and middle-income groups with an education level of high school and below are the main components of China's population.
A hit is the dream of all those who do short dramas.
However, there are still a few people in this industry who really make a hit. Many people rushed into the short drama track, thinking that they could make a wave of quick money at a low cost, and only found that the short drama was not simple until the invested works hit the street.
The big investment, long cycle, and slow ** of short dramas and traditional film and television dramas are very different from the upstream script creation IP acquisition, midstream shooting and production, and then downstream distribution and broadcasting, the entire industrial chain has a clear division of labor, and each link is short and fast.
If you fancy a theme, you can rush out of the script in three or five days, finish it in seven or eight days of shooting, and then use one or two months to finish the product in the later stage; But for the short drama industry, the finished product is easy, but the hit is difficult.
In the industry, everyone knows that it takes 15 seconds to have a conflict or reversal, 30 seconds to advance the plot, and the last 10 seconds to give suspense. However, it is quite difficult to show emotions through a narrow vertical screen in a minute or two, and attract the audience to watch it. With the blowout of works in the market, the audience's coolness is getting higher and higher.
The "shortness" of short dramas is also reflected in the industrial process. It does not need to be pre-announced and pre-heated, but after the production is completed, it is directly handed over to the distributor to cast the stream.
For a short drama, streaming is listing, and the consumption of advertising money during the period means that there are many people who recharge, and it will be clear within 48 hours whether it is a hit or not.
From the perspective of consumption, why do audiences need to consume short dramas?
In terms of the "lipstick economy", real life is very difficult, and many people have no time to entertain and relax. Why not?
This is also the popular logic of short dramas, high-frequency reversal, cool points are intensive, and the faster the top, the higher the commercial value.
On the contrary, for a short drama, no matter how exquisite the production and high the concept is, it is not cool enough, and it is nothing.
Reelshort, a Chinese short drama overseas platform focusing on the North American market, first entered the domestic public eye in November 2023.
At that time, three of the top four apps in the U.S. App Store** were from China, and they were the overseas version of Pinduoduo Temu, the overseas version of Douyin TikTok, and the little-known Reelshort.
On the platform, its main works include "The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband", "Never Divorce a Secret Billionaire Heiress", and The CEO'S Contract Wife ("The CEO's Contract Wife"), True Luna ("The Real Moonlight Goddess")....It is not difficult to see from the title of the play that its content routine is no different from that of domestic short dramas.
In order to be more suitable for local audiences, the actors have also been replaced with local faces in Reelshort's short drama themes, which mainly focus on werewolves, bosses, and vampires that are more preferred by North American audiences.
However, while Reelshort is attracting gold in the North American market, the domestic reputation is polarized. Many netizens said, "It's so embarrassing, I thought about cultural export, but I didn't expect it to be such a cultural output."
However, in the author's opinion, embarrassment is actually a personal feeling. As a completely 2C platform, Reelshort's profit model mainly adopts the method of charging for a single episode, and after users try to watch a certain number of episodes, they will be charged at 10 70 cents per episode. This fee is not cheap, but the audience is willing to pay, which shows that the audience resonates with it.
It is understood that up to 70% of Reelshort's users are women aged 25-45. The common dilemma faced by this group is that time is seriously "cut" by housework and picking up and dropping off children, and the short drama is high-energy, reversed, and stimulating, which is suitable for their fragmentation**.
In addition to these local original dramas on reelshort that are re-written and filmed according to the market, in fact, more Chinese short dramas go overseas by directly putting domestic short dramas on overseas apps after being translated or bilingually recorded**, for example, those that appear in the Southeast Asian market, Europe, the Middle East and other markets are mainly translated short dramas.
Some people say that compared with the popular Korean drama "Squid Game", which is popular in the global mainstream market, Chinese short dramas have not yet entered the mainstream overseas, and there is no so-called "cultural export".
The author disagreesIn fact, there is no distinction between high and low spiritual consumer products.
Whether it is a translation or an original production, Chinese short dramas can enter multiple overseas markets because of the creative team's understanding and respect for local culture and values.
In the same way, there is no doubt that overseas audiences are consuming spiritual products from China, and they are also colliding and integrating with our cultural values.
The year 2023 that has just passed is a painful and optimistic year for the short drama industry.
Optimism comes from the fact that the industry continues to be hot, and more and more people are beginning to understand short dramas from questioning short dramas, and gradually letting go of the stereotype that short dramas are vulgar and unpopular.
The pain is because many short dramas have been supervised and offline due to problems such as showing off their wealth and fighting for wealth, strange mutations, vulgarity and vulgarity, and the short drama industry has ushered in a review system.
From the perspective of the market, it is not a bad thing to have regulation. In the past two years, the supply and sales of the short drama market have been booming, which comes from the standardization and guidance of policies and regulations.
From the perspective of industry observation, today's short drama is very reminiscent of Pinduoduo, which was just released back then. At first, when everyone saw its products for the sinking market, they all felt low, and it was even more difficult to accept its viral transmission method.
As Pinduoduo found a massive user base, ran out of the market scale, and its products and services continued to iterate, and finally completed the rural encirclement of the city, everyone suddenly realized that it was the consumer side of China's largest base.
Looking forward to Chinese short dramas, they will also walk out of such a low and high way and change the paradigm of the industry.
The author is associate dean and professor of economics at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business