The short play goes to sea and conquers the ＂five rings outside＂ of the world.

The short play goes to sea and conquers the "five rings outside" of the world.

"Look, this woman’s name is Xiaomei. After three years of marriage, when she was pregnant, she was once again pulled by love rat’s husband to give Bai Yueguang a blood transfusion, and then she was abandoned by her heart. This little fresh meat is called Xiao Shuai, who appeared beside Xiaomei when she was sad and started a fanatical pursuit; At this point, the ex-husband found Xiaomei’s identity as an invisible rich second generation and tried to save it … "

Familiar settings, familiar plot trends, familiar reversal in less than two minutes, familiar episode after episode makes people feel uncomfortable, but it has a completely unfamiliar "face"-the scenes are all in Europe and America, the actors are all white faces who speak pure English, and the audience watching the drama is mostly from the American market.

In recent months, this 55-episode short play "Never Divorce a Secret Billionaire Heiress" with each episode less than 2 minutes has exploded in the United States. There are also many short plays in North America, the themes of which include werewolves, vampires, and masochism of giants, but the core is very unified, and they are all love stories of "overbearing president falling in love with me".

Surprisingly, these seemingly authentic European and American short plays are actually driven by a China company. ReelShort, which publishes these short plays, is a short play App developed by Crazy Maple Studio, a Chinese online subsidiary of a domestic digital publishing company, mainly for the American market.

From left to right in the top row: the short play Never Divorce a Secret Billionaire Heir, Fate Destined 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 short dramas, ReelShort has been ranked wildly in app stores in many countries and regions since July this year. As of November 11th, ReelShort successfully ranked among the top three in the total list of App Store in the United States, Britain and Canada, and became a dark horse application that overshadowed TikTok for a while. According to the statistics of Appfigures, the data analysis platform, its download volume in the first 17 days of November has exceeded 1.9 million, and the cumulative download volume has exceeded 11 million.

ReelShort’s overseas gold-digging ability is also surprising. According to foreign media Techcrunch, on November 11th, its net income after deducting the payment of app store fees was USD 459,000, or about RMB 3.28 million. As of November 17th, the accumulated net income has exceeded USD 22 million, or about RMB 160 million.

This even boosted A-shares, giving birth to a group of popular "short drama concept stocks", and nearly 10 stocks such as Chinese Online, Palm Reading Technology, Shanghai Film and Yaowang Technology ushered in daily limit. As of the close of November 24, the market value of Chinese online has soared by 14.6 billion yuan this month.

ReelShort website home page.

The new cognition that "the whole world has always eaten this set of tyrants" has also made more people see the hope of copying the myth of "eight days to recharge and break through 100 million".

"At present, the overseas market is recharged at around $10 million a month." Liu Jinlong, head of overseas business of Kyushu Culture, told China Newsweek, "If we stand for 3-5 years, we can judge that the global short drama market can reach a market scale of more than 10 billion US dollars."

Since the second half of this year, China’s short plays are drifting to the other side of the ocean more violently. A number of domestic film and television production practitioners told China Newsweek that in recent days, many different types of players have been actively looking for doors to communicate the needs of building short dramas at sea. Including domestic small program drama distributors, long video platforms, film and television companies, web platforms, social platforms, game manufacturers, etc., all flocked; As far as the sea destination is concerned, the North American market is becoming a new battleground for military strategists, and Southeast Asia and the Middle East have also become hot spots for many players to try to develop.

This war, which was originally regarded as "the war outside the Fifth Ring Road", is accelerating to spread around the world.

When Long Aotian turned into Sebastian

"accident."

When it comes to the performance of Chinese-style tyrants’ short plays that exploded overseas, the first reactions of many film and television industry practitioners are basically the same.

After all, since its launch in August last year, ReelShort has tried to transport short plays with high domestic output and soaring recharge income to the sea. However, these short plays, which people can’t help charging money all the time in China, have always been cool, whether it’s the theme of "God of War+Husband-in-law" by men or "overlord+sadomasochism" by love women, have not aroused any splash after hanging English subtitles.

But ReelShort didn’t stop the short play from going to sea. According to Zhang Yi, CEO and chief analyst of Ai Media Consulting, at the end of last year, the ReelShort team headquartered in Silicon Valley began to try a more localized production method, adopting an overseas shooting team, enabling European and American actors, and combining the themes of werewolves and vampires that are more familiar to European and American audiences while retaining the core of China’s popular short plays, so as to create a more localized short play.

As a result, "Long Aotian began to turn into Sebastian and Jackson" and "Leng Bingning turned into Selena and Aliya" in the Chinese short play, and continued to complete the sweet and abusive two-way trip again and again in a more European and American setting.

The European and American-style "local flavor" short drama, which was packaged locally and lasted less than 2 minutes per episode, did attract more and more local users through the promotion on social media platforms such as TikTok and Facebook in the following six months.

Take ReelShort’s explosive short drama "Fated to My Forbidden Alpha" at the top of TikTok’s homepage as an example. The first 20 episodes of the drama released on TikTok have received more than 60 million broadcasts, and the maximum broadcast volume of a single episode exceeds 30 million; There are many praises in the comment area, such as "I want to watch more" and "I feel like watching Twilight", and many people are asking where I can watch the complete series.

Following the official guidance in the comment area, the audience who wanted to know how the female host became stronger after being abused at the beginning, how she would distinguish the right man and have a vigorous love affair with him naturally chose to download the App, and then began to unlock the remaining 59 episodes except the trailer and the first episode by watching advertisements or paying fees. Even after watching 20 episodes on TikTok, they can only unlock them from the second episode one by one. Judging from the details page of ReelShort, the play has been played more than 100 million times on the App.

After running through the mode, ReelShort launched more short plays around the four themes of "Love After Marriage", "Falling for the Alpha", "Sweet Revenge" and "Dating My Boss", and more explosions were born one after another.

With the birth of short dramas that exploded in the sea, the golden attraction of domestic short dramas began to appear in ReelShort App. As can be seen from some comments, overseas audiences are also spitting out the cliche of the plot, but at the same time they can’t help but spend money to unlock it-after all, just after watching the hostess, she got a slap in the face with a vicious female partner, so angry that she had to "continue to spend money to watch the drama" to solve her own confusion.

According to Appfigures data, ReelShort generates an average income of about $2 every time a user downloads it. Specifically, according to China Newsweek’s incomplete statistics, the single episode of its short plays is priced at 50-80 recharge coins, and the number of episodes is generally around 50-60. According to the recharge rules, it often costs nearly $20 or even more to catch up with a play, and the price of Binet.Alfred Flying Standard Edition members is even higher at $15.49 per month.

Above: The short play "Dangerous Contract: Let Me Go, Mr. CEO" was launched in Malaysia. Figure/Shanghai Fanku Media

Bottom left and bottom right: The shooting scene of an overseas short play produced by China Company. Figure/Kyushu culture

By July of this year, ReelShort ushered in its first peak with this set of play. According to the data of the analysis platform SensorTower, in July this year, the total downloads of ReelShort on GooglePlay and App Store reached 1.9 million times, and the monthly flow reached 6 million dollars-which means that the average daily paid income can reach 1.4 million yuan.

Although it can’t be compared with the domestic full-platform paid short play with an average daily recharge consumption of 60 million yuan, the rise of ReelShort at this stage has made many practitioners "suddenly wake up"-it turns out that it is not that the bully has no overseas appeal, but needs to change his skin. "The psychological needs of audiences in different countries are similar. If you want to go to sea successfully, you need to be more connected with Europe and the United States." Niu Jing, a producer of a film and television company in Beijing, told China Newsweek.

In the final analysis, being able to dream a dream that can’t be realized in reality with a sense of substitution is becoming more and more universal for the global audience. Nowadays, in addition to the "overbearing president’s global take-all", the theme preference of short plays at sea in different regions has been revealed. For example, European and American audiences prefer dramatic and high visual impact works such as werewolves and vampires, while the Middle East likes cool dramas, while Southeast Asia prefers sweet pets and sadomasochism.

In Zhang Yi’s view, the essence of short plays is to meet people’s spiritual and cultural needs, but only to meet people’s immediate and fragmented entertainment needs in a low-cost way, which has the ability to cross social status, class and country. At the same time, with the increase of work pressure, this demand is generally more and more obvious.

It is precisely because of this that Chinese-style short plays have exploded overseas, which coincides with the view that the short video "works can resonate and it will naturally become popular" mentioned by TikTok CEO Zhou Zi in an exclusive interview with the founder of TED not long ago.

However, in the European and American domestic markets, the content and form of short plays were blank. And blank means opportunity.

The short play went to sea at the right time.

The wind of the short play going out to sea is not blown out of thin air. Many interviewees believe that nowadays, China’s short plays have many basic conditions for going to sea.

On the one hand, although it has not been born for a long time, the domestic short play market has gradually matured. "After many Internet companies have developed to a certain stage in China, they will naturally copy this business model overseas quickly." Liu Jinlong told China Newsweek.

Since the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television added a "network mini-short drama" section to the filing system at the end of 2020, the domestic short drama market has entered a period of rapid development, the industrial chain and its industrialized and streamlined collaborative production mode have been relatively mature, and the business model has also been verified by the market. This is also the origin of the short drama becoming the myth of "shooting in one week, exceeding 100 million in eight days".

The domestic short play market is also growing with the trend of breaking bamboo. According to the consulting report of Ai Media, in 2023, the market size of China miniseries is expected to reach 37.39 billion yuan, up 267.65% year on year. Zhang Yi believes that under the background that the spiritual life pursued by people is basically the same, short plays can make sense in the domestic market with a population of 1.4 billion, and they can also make sense globally. Moreover, even if overseas players have corresponding layouts, domestic short drama related practitioners have more advantages in cost efficiency.

"Short plays really need a lot of manpower, time and energy to do, and the China team is really much more competitive in this respect." Chen Xiufeng, co-founder and chief producer of Shanghai Fanku Culture Media Co., Ltd. also said.

On the other hand, short plays are essentially short video products of online novels. Previously, China’s online writing successfully went to sea, and in the long years of the past 20 years, it cultivated a large number of overseas audiences’ preferences for online novels such as Ba Zong, Sadism, Fantasy, Xiu Zhen and Xian Xia, which laid an audience foundation for short plays and provided a rich and market-proven IP source reserve for short plays. Since then, TikTok has continuously expanded its territory, allowing the world to open the short video era one after another, providing a more direct infrastructure for the promotion and transformation of short plays.

The shooting scene of the short play Revenge After Diverce: 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 to sea. "Before the writers, actors, directors and other creative teams didn’t work, the quotations were very low. Now there are more projects, and everyone’s quotations are also rising." Yan Xiufeng introduced. At the same time, the audience’s demand for short plays is getting higher and higher, which also makes the production cost of short plays in China keep rising. "In the male frequency category, the cost of many short plays with a collective volume of 100% 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 small drama distributor, who asked not to be named, said that coupled with the rising cost of streaming (that is, advertising), platforms such as Tik Tok and WeChat also began to charge channel fees, and the profit margin left for short drama enterprises was becoming smaller and smaller.

Li Tao, the producer of the explosive short play "Wushuang" which set a record for the top-up of short plays this year, and the founder of Xi ‘an Fenghang Company, once calculated an account for the media: "Small programs and short plays rely heavily on investment expenditure, which is calculated according to the industry average ROI (return on investment) standard of 1.2. Assuming that the investment is 100 million yuan, its profit will not exceed 20 million yuan, including manpower and shooting costs. After deduction, the net profit is about several million yuan, and then it is divided by the upstream and downstream participants such as the small program platform and the contractor. "

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 plays also need to embark on the road of quality and innovation, and the barbaric growth in the past will no longer exist, and the choice of themes will be greatly restricted.

Under all kinds of anxiety, facing the blue ocean market, the upsurge of short plays going to sea has now surged.

When she visited Hengdian in October this year, Niu Jing found that Hengdian was building a real-life shed of European and American style. A staff member of Shanghai European and American studios also introduced that its European and American shed was welcoming more short drama crews with foreign actors. It can also be observed from social media platforms such as Little Red Book that a number of overseas Chinese shooting teams in the United States, Britain and other western countries have opened accounts to show their shooting cases, looking forward to cooperating with domestic platforms for short drama projects.

A number of domestic film and television production practitioners told China Newsweek that in the past six months, there have been several platforms to select topics and scripts for short dramas going to sea, and companies are invited to shoot and produce them, and the basic themes are all related to women’s love. A short drama producer in the United States posted on social media that he had been communicating with Party A’s platform every day for half a year, and the shooting schedule was always full, without a day off.

"Some platforms are slowly on track, some may just be doing apps, and some will be online soon." After talking with a number of platforms about cooperation in the sea, Yan Xiufeng concluded, "It is certain that there will be more and more platforms going out to sea, and everyone’s enthusiasm is very high."

Outside the short drama platform, more and more different types of players are joining the short drama to the sea. According to Liu Jinlong, at present, companies in different fields, including iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video, Lemon Film, Huace Film, and even Alipay, all have short drama-related actions, or are developing overseas short drama apps or contacting overseas teams to prepare for shooting.

According to the incomplete statistics of China Newsweek, since the beginning of this year, several domestic-made short drama apps have been launched overseas, such as GoodShort, MoboReels, the social platform of Chizi City, 99TV and ShortTV, the domestic small drama platforms of Kyushu Culture.

Rebuilding localization assembly line

At present, most short drama platforms going out to sea are taking the North American market as the main position to go out to sea.

On the one hand, the themes that domestic short plays are good at have been recognized by North American users, and there is much room for them from the perspective of content; On the other hand, "many platforms have been tested in small batches and found that the payment effect in the US market will be better". During the communication 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. "Under the same investment, team size and cycle, the input-output ratio in the North American market will be higher, and short plays similar to American dramas are the product of globalization, which can be distributed to any part of the world and cover global users." Liu Jinlong explained, "At the same time, for this group of people who go 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 diggers outside the North American market. Southeast Asia, which is closer to China’s culture, and the Middle East, where users have higher incomes, especially the latter, are also becoming hot spots for domestic players.

The shooting scene of an overseas short play produced by China Company. Figure/Kyushu culture

According to Liu Jinlong, countries in the Middle East have higher incomes, while women who are in a weak position in social rights are more eager to be cured in the content of love, so domestic female frequency content is also generally welcomed by users in this region, and the competition is not as fierce as that in North America and Southeast Asia; Although the paid income in Southeast Asia is limited, the input cost is relatively low, and cultural similarity may also attract higher traffic, which will be realized through traffic.

For different markets, short plays have derived different models. Take Kyushu culture as an example, its ShortTV, which is mainly oriented to the English market, has two main sources of short plays: First, the theme and domestic short plays suitable for the European and American markets are translated and re-dubbed, and then put on the platform. "It may have been felt that it would be difficult for China’s film and television dramas to enter the European and American markets, but in fact, our (translated) short plays have already got very good payment data." Liu Jinlong said.

The second category is that after purchasing the appropriate novel IP for the European and American markets, our own and cooperative scriptwriters will adapt the short play script, and after the script is finalized, we will contact local teams in overseas countries such as the United States, Europe, Australia and Malaysia to shoot and produce it. This is also the more mainstream way for short play platforms facing the European and American markets, such as ReelShort and GoodShort.

In addition, there is another kind specially designed for Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan and overseas Chinese. Kyushu culture is mainly aimed at the short plays of global Chinese in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, Southeast Asia and other regions, App 99TV basically puts domestic short plays and traditional Chinese characters on the line directly behind the scenes.

Niu Jing is about to start three short drama projects at sea, using the way of shooting in domestic European and American style studios and looking for foreign actors to shoot in China. Although this method is not as strong as overseas shooting in localization, it is better than translating short plays; The production cost is higher and the cycle is longer than that of the translated short play, but it is more controllable than that of overseas shooting.

Liu Jinlong introduced that at present, the production cost of ShortTV’s overseas short plays started at 150,000 US dollars. According to Xiaguang News Agency, the production budget of a short play in ReelShort can reach $200,000. In Niu Jing’s calculation, the cost of his short drama about to start shooting in Shanghai is about $120,000.

In addition to the above three methods, some AI technology suppliers are also entering the short play sea track, providing short play platforms and producers with AI capabilities such as script development, short play face changing-replacing Asian faces with European and American faces, intelligent dubbing and dynamic mouth adaptation. "We are now working with several technical teams to integrate the application of AI in film and television, trying to see if we can directly adjust some short plays we already have and move them overseas, so that the efficiency will be higher and the cost will be saved a lot." Yan Xiufeng said.

Like domestic short plays, short plays at sea are mainly promoted by streaming, the only difference is that the delivery platform is switched to Facebook, TikTok, Google search, YouTube and so on. "At present, the cost of obtaining customers overseas for the whole industry is about US$ 5, which is lower than the cost of a domestic paying user of 100~200 yuan." Liu Jinlong told China Newsweek.

In terms of business model, the short drama App currently going out to sea generally relies on two major revenues: payment and advertising. The proportion of the two is quite different in different countries and regions.

According to Liu Jinlong, in countries such as the United States where users have strong ability to pay, the short drama episodes on the ShortTV platform are generally priced at around $0.3; In the Philippines, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries, considering the local income level, the single episode pricing has dropped to about $0.1, and more activities to watch the advertisement unlock have been promoted, thus "allowing more users with weak payment ability to brush more dramas".

In addition to these two mainstream business models, GoodShort also tried the subscription system, and public information shows that its membership fee ranges from 99.99 US dollars to 399.99 US dollars.

Can you copy the "myth of getting rich"

As the form of short plays is accepted by overseas audiences, the affordability of different regions has been verified. Does it mean that the "rich myth" of domestic short plays can be replicated overseas?

As far as this initial stage is concerned, there are still many challenges in front of players who are actively going out to sea.

From the perspective of content supply, the form of overseas local short drama shooting is constantly raising the production cost and cycle. On the one hand, it is a problem how to calibrate the script of the short play at sea more locally as the source. According to Liu Jinlong, at present, Kyushu Culture has re-recruited a batch of screenwriters for the overseas projects, basically all of whom are required to have a background of studying abroad, be familiar with European and American markets and have strong scriptwriting skills, or be high-quality editors in the process of going to sea. After the initial adaptation of the IP of overseas novels, these editors need to polish the cultural differences, colloquialism and other details of the script together with the directors and screenwriters of overseas production teams, which takes two or three months at present.

In the shooting process, whether shooting overseas or in China, "the unit price of foreign actors will be much higher, and foreign actors can generally only accept 8-12 hours of work a day. Previously, domestic short drama crews were shooting for about 15 or 16 hours a day." Yan Xiufeng introduced.

"Overseas market users attach great importance to the light and shadow effect, so we all adopt the film production team in the short drama project, and strive to approach the picture quality of European and American film and television dramas." Niu Jing also mentioned that at present, the production cost of this form of short drama at sea is more than three times that of domestic short drama, and the shooting cycle takes 10~15 days, while the domestic short drama with a collective volume of 100 is generally completed in about one week.

All the above problems will directly affect the frequency and sustainability of content supply on the platform. According to public information, at present, ReelShort updates two short plays about a month, and there are only more than 20 short plays in the whole platform; ShortTV currently updates 3~5 overseas short plays every month, and currently updates 10 short plays. According to De Tawen’s Micro-Short Plays Market Report for the First Half of 2023, there were 481 new short plays in China in the first half of 2023, and the number of short plays going out to sea at this stage was much less.

Under the condition of low update frequency, it may not be so easy for short drama players to go to sea frequently and create more explosive short dramas in the face of changing user needs. Whether this will affect the long-term payment performance of customers and overseas users, and whether the platform can greatly improve the content supply capacity as the production mode and market of short plays at sea become more and more mature, all kinds of challenges are imminent.

What directly affects the liquidity is that it still takes time to test the efficiency of the short play at sea.

Different from the domestic link that can directly jump to the paid viewing of small drama from TikTok platform, there is no ecological base for small drama in overseas markets. At present, after publishing advertising materials on social media platforms such as Facebook and Tiktok, short drama platforms need to guide users to jump to the App store to download the App, and then enter the app to register and pay for viewing after logging in. The intermediate link is longer, which will lead to more traffic loss.

At present, although the cost of getting customers overseas is lower than that in China, according to Liu Jinlong, domestic short plays can be directly reflected in the top-up income on the same day. However, if you make an independent App overseas, you can’t directly see the income feedback brought by the investment on the same day. "It may take one week, two weeks or even one month for an overseas drama to sell at the box office." However, from the perspective of ROI (Return on Investment), this will inevitably mean higher requirements for users’ ability to pay continuously. Together, these two are the hidden worries on the road of realizing short plays in the sea.

In addition to the liquidity, 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 problems that all short-play players have to face and overcome one by one. At the same time, players, including small drama platforms and social platforms, have to face the competition situation in which upstream IP accumulates more abundant online platforms and kills them with a higher posture.

Can short plays go to sea become a new and good business to make money? Standing in the moment, no one can answer this question. As Chen Xiufeng said, "Everything about the short play at sea has just started, and it is still in the exploratory stage". The only certainty is that people who have entered, are entering and are about to enter the game believe in the vast space for short plays to go to sea.

Published in China Newsweek magazine, No.1119, December 4, 2023.

Magazine title: "Ba Zong" short play goes to sea.

journalist: Shi Hanxu