Short-form dramas growing fast

ByteDance's short-drama app Hongguo has overtaken its fast-growing artificial intelligence assistant Doubao in user numbers, underscoring how short-form dramas are emerging as one of the strongest drivers of engagement in China's increasingly saturated mobile internet market.

According to a report released by mobile internet research firm QuestMobile on Tuesday, Hongguo Free Short Drama had 430 million users in September, ahead of Doubao's 419 million. It made Hongguo ByteDance's second-largest app by users after Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which had 1.029 billion users.

The shift comes as growth in China's overall mobile internet population slows and competition among tech companies increasingly moves from acquiring new users to capturing more of their time.

China's mobile internet user base reached 1.281 billion in September, up just 0.9 percent from a year earlier, QuestMobile said. The average monthly time spent per user rose 6.5 percent to 189.8 hours.

Short-drama videos and short-form videos together accounted for 111.5 percent among the net increase in mobile internet usage time, as declines in other categories offset part of their gains, according to the report.

Time spent on short-drama videos increased by a net 13.329 billion hours from a year earlier in September, while short-video usage rose by 5.717 billion hours. By comparison, generative AI applications, the third-largest contributor, added 978 million hours.

Traditional online video, meanwhile, lost 1.38 billion hours of usage time.

The diverging trends point to a shift in how Chinese consumers spend their entertainment time, with faster-paced, often free short dramas taking attention away from conventional long-form video platforms.

That shift is also reshaping the traffic portfolios of China's biggest internet companies.

Tencent, ByteDance and Alibaba had total unduplicated user bases of 1.280 billion, 1.259 billion and 1.258 billion, respectively, as of September, QuestMobile data showed, leaving the three companies broadly neck-and-neck in overall user reach.

With little room left to expand the total pool of internet users, securing a larger share of existing users' time is becoming a more important battleground.

Wang Xiaohong, director of the online video research center at the Communication University of China, said: "The industry is moving from a phase driven mainly by the scale dividend of rapid user growth toward one in which content quality and value creation would matter more. The competition used to be about traffic. Now it is about quality."

chengyu@chinadaily.com.cn