On September 25th, at the 2024 iJOY Autumn Enjoyment Conference, iQIYI founder and CEO Gong Yu announced that iQIYI will launch two theaters: "Micro Theater" and "Short Theater".
On site demonstration materials show that the duration of a single episode of "Micro Theater" is about 1-5 minutes, mainly in portrait mode, and the content types include female, male, silver hair, etc; The duration of a single episode of "Short Theater" is about 5-20 minutes, with landscape mode, and content types including ancient stories, current events, suspense, and others. Both theaters support members to watch for free.
Wang Xiaohui, Chief Content Officer of iQiyi, believes that short dramas have created a second fusion of long and short videos. It's still up to professional creators to tell stories, but the way they tell stories has been changed. The first fusion was known to be slicing and promotion, but this time everyone truly integrated in their creation
According to the latest data from China Internet Network Information Center, as of June this year, the number of users of online videos (including short videos and mini dramas) had reached 1.068 billion, an increase of 1.25 million over December 2023, accounting for 97.1% of the total number of Internet users.
Long video platforms have already dabbled in the micro drama business and proposed various support plans, but they have rarely used it as a brand construction. A reporter from Beike Finance of the New Beijing News noticed that previously, among the four major video platforms of "Aiyou Tengmang", only Tencent Video and Mango TV launched "Ten point Theater" and "Damang Theater" respectively.
In addition, among the four major video platforms' micro drama content, iQiyi's previous "volume" was relatively small in terms of the number of episodes, box office revenue, and popularity.
According to the "2023 Short Drama Report" by Yunhe Data, Tencent Video released a total of 218 new short dramas in 2023, with a cumulative effective playback of 4.6 billion; Youku has launched 159 new episodes, with a cumulative effective playback of 1 billion; 42 new episodes have been released on Mango TV, with a cumulative effective playback of 400 million; IQiyi has released 16 new films, with a total of 500 million effective views.
According to Yunhe Data, in 2023, a total of six short dramas broke the 10 million mark at the box office, with Tencent Video's "provoked" reaching a box office of 20 million, ranking first. Among the top 10 (including tied) works at the box office, Tencent Video accounted for 10, while Youku and Mango TV accounted for 2 and 1 respectively.
According to the observation of the entertainment industry market by Yien Data in August this year, in the "Aiyou Tengmang" platform, the top 5 micro short drama popularity indexes on Tencent Video all exceeded 10000, and the number one work on Mango TV also exceeded 10000 views. However, the top 5 micro short drama popularity indexes on iQiyi and Youku platforms did not exceed 10000 views.
According to data from iResearch Consulting, the market size of the micro drama industry is expected to reach 35.86 billion yuan in 2023. It is predicted that the market size of the micro drama industry will reach 48.46 billion yuan in 2024, and the industry market size is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan in the next five years.