(Yicai) Oct. 30 -- ByteDance-owned streaming platform Hongguo Short Drama is emerging as a major player in China’s video market. Its daily user base now exceeds the combined audiences of the country’s four leading long-form video sites, while the app ranks fourth nationwide for user attention, underscoring the soaring popularity of short dramas.

Hongguo, which was launched in 2023, accounted for 5 percent of the time Chinese users spend using apps in July, ranking behind only TikTok's sister app Douyin -- also owned by ByteDance -- at 19.4 percent, Tencent Holdings' super app WeChat at 18.8 percent, and Douyin Express Edition at 6.3 percent, according to the latest data from QuestMobile. 

In addition, Hongguo’s daily active users more than doubled to 168 million in the same month from a year earlier, exceeding the combined total for long-form video platforms Tencent Video, iQiyi, Youku, and Mango TV.

The short drama market’s rapid expansion is drawing in more competitors. Monthly active users of Lvpaopao, a new WeChat mini-program, had 143 million monthly active users in August, QuestMobile’s data showed. That reached almost 90 million in the first week of this month, up 44 percent from the first week of last month.

Amid growing concerns about video content quality, Douyin Vice President Li Liang took to Weibo yesterday, saying there is no essential difference between short dramas, films, and television series.

Artificial intelligence will open up new possibilities for video production, particularly for short dramas, Li said, adding that in genres such as historical fiction and science fiction, AI can make it possible to depict scenes that would be difficult or prohibitively expensive using conventional methods.

Li expressed optimism about the potential for short-form dramas over the coming years, predicting that creative capabilities will continue to evolve, potentially reaching a production standard comparable with that of Hollywood blockbusters.

Editor: Martin Kadiev