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In the &#34;winter of stock&#34; where mobile internet traffic has peaked, ByteDance has once again proven its dominance as a &#34;super APP factory.&#34;
Industry information on February 1st shows that the daily active users (DAU) of the Hongguo short drama app have officially surpassed 100 million. This means that, following Jinri Toutiao, Douyin, Doubao, and Fanqie Novel, Hongguo short drama has become the fifth independent application within the ByteDance system to achieve over 100 million daily active users. ByteDance has not yet responded to this news.
For Hongguo, reaching over 100 million daily active users is a new milestone.
In less than three years, Hongguo has completed the leap from a marginal player to a dominant force in the market. According to data released by QuestMobile for October 2025, Hongguo's monthly active users (MAU) have reached 245 million, surpassing Bilibili (227 million) and Youku (173 million), and even slightly exceeding Xiaohongshu (234 million), firmly securing the fourth position in the online video sector, only behind Tencent Video, iQIYI, and Mango TV.
However, interpreting Hongguo's victory merely as a &#34;victory of the free model&#34; or &#34;the windfall of short dramas&#34; greatly underestimates ByteDance's ambitions. Behind Hongguo's daily active users surpassing 100 million, it is attempting to reshape the film and television production paradigm with a rigorous algorithm factory, building a decentralized &#34;content operating system,&#34; and ultimately seizing the pricing power of IP assets.
This is not a simple app growth story; it is an experiment on how the content industry can be completely consumed by &#34;computing power&#34; and &#34;factory logic.&#34;
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<h2>01 &#34;Free&#34; Feeding Pleasure</h2>
The daily active users of Hongguo short drama, in essence, represent a dimensional blow of the &#34;free + advertising&#34; model against the &#34;pay-to-unlock&#34; model.
Before Hongguo's rise, the short drama market, especially WeChat mini-program short dramas, followed a simple and brutal profit logic: users were attracted by snippets in the information flow, and after clicking through, the first 10 episodes were free, while subsequent episodes required payment to unlock.
This pay-per-episode model is heavily reliant on traffic investment and is a gamble on ROI; for users, the cost of watching a drama could easily reach dozens or even hundreds of yuan, which remains a high barrier.
Hongguo completely replicated the strategy of &#34;Fanqie Novel&#34; defeating the paid reading model of the Yuedu system: everything is free. It precisely penetrated the mindset of the sinking market and price-sensitive users.
In the economic cycle from 2024 to 2025, public entertainment consumption is becoming more rational, and Hongguo quickly attracted a large number of short drama audiences who had previously been lost due to high costs with its &#34;watch the entire series for free&#34; approach. According to QuestMobile data, a considerable proportion of its 245 million monthly active users come from third- and fourth-tier cities and the middle-aged and elderly population, who not only contribute viewing time but also provide a very high tolerance for advertisements
Unlike the content distribution logic of Youku and Bilibili, Hongguo's product form is closer to Douyin. It abandons the &#34;shelf-style&#34; search of traditional video platforms and adopts a full-screen immersive vertical scrolling experience.
The powerful recommendation algorithm plays a core role here. By calculating user viewing duration, completion rates, and interaction behaviors in real-time, Hongguo can push the &#34;feel-good dramas&#34; that best match users' tastes right in front of them. This &#34;infinite flow&#34; viewing experience greatly extends users' usage time and lays a sticky foundation for over 100 million daily active users.
The emergence of Hongguo's short dramas also rewrites the rules on the supply side of the industry.
Some industry insiders believe that beneath the surface of being free, Hongguo has truly constructed a barrier by pushing the industrial boundaries of the supply side unprecedentedly to the upstream of the film and television industry chain.
This insider further stated that Hongguo is no longer a simple content playback platform; its operational logic resembles a precise &#34;content factory.&#34; Here, ByteDance efficiently transplanted the &#34;data feeding + hit template + algorithm feedback&#34; mechanism practiced in the fields of text and short videos into the process of selecting short dramas.
For example, what themes can be popular? There is no need for producers to guess. The system automatically generates a topic library based on real-time trending topics on Douyin and high-retention keywords from Tomato Novel. If &#34;revenge + getting rich&#34; has a high completion rate on Tomato, then Hongguo's topic model will immediately lock in that direction.
The so-called &#34;feel-good points&#34; have also been broken down into reusable industrial modules. At what second must there be a conflict? At what episode must there be a twist? These are no longer creative techniques but mandatory engineering standards.
It can be said that to some extent, it did not rely on luck to hit the trend but crushed workshop-style peers with industrial efficiency.
Industry insiders believe that what stands behind Hongguo is not a traditional &#34;content community,&#34; but a meticulously operating supply chain.
The highly rational industrialized system allows Hongguo to achieve &#34;high turnover&#34; and &#34;high success rate&#34; in content. While competitors are still polishing a script for half a year, Hongguo can already produce numerous &#34;video products&#34; that precisely hit user emotions in bulk based on data feedback.
The rise of Hongguo is also reshaping the current film and television industry. By 2024, the market size of the micro-short drama industry is expected to exceed film box office for the first time, breaking through 50 billion yuan.
Zhang Yi, chief analyst at iiMedia Research, told Wall Street Journal that from the production side, it will force the film and television industry to upgrade industrialization, especially with the entry of professional teams and capital, which will gradually impact the reconstruction of production cycles and related cost and salary systems. At the same time, from a business model perspective, it also breaks the single model of film box office plus copyright, and the combination with advertising e-commerce is expected to become a new monetization method. From the distribution channel perspective, the APP side has become the core distribution channel for short dramas, also forcing cinema chains and streaming media to explore new cross-form cooperation models.
With the rise of short drama platforms and more mainstream actors entering the short drama scene, it also means that the transformation that began from the grassroots is influencing the entire film and television circle
<h2>02 The Cultivation of Content Ecology</h2>
The industry shock of Hongguo Short Drama achieving over 100 million daily active users goes far beyond the success of a single app.
Behind the rise of Hongguo Short Drama lies a more grand content ecology that ByteDance is building. In the past, we understood algorithms as: if you watch beautiful women on Douyin, Douyin will recommend more beautiful women to you; if you read political news on Toutiao, Toutiao will push you news articles. Now, the over 100 million daily active users of Hongguo prove the elevation of this logic: ByteDance is no longer just distributing content, but distributing &#34;desires&#34; and &#34;pleasure points.&#34;
This is a capability of &#34;homogeneous interests, heterogeneous distribution.&#34; On Douyin, users consume high-frequency, fragmented visual stimuli (30-second clips); on Tomato Novel, users consume deep, text-based imaginative engagement (millions of words of web literature); on Hongguo Short Drama, users consume continuous, visual narrative pleasure (100 episodes of short dramas).
These three apps seem independent, but in ByteDance's backend, they share the same user interest model. The success of Hongguo essentially validates the success rate of this &#34;cross-carrier interest migration.&#34;
It proves that the demand for a certain &#34;pleasure point&#34; is constant; only the carrier changes. Through Hongguo, ByteDance successfully aggregated traffic that was originally locked in text (Tomato) or scattered in fragments (Douyin) into a new &#34;long narrative form&#34; container.
If we broaden our perspective, we will find that Hongguo Short Drama is a key puzzle piece in ByteDance's attempt to construct a &#34;content OS.&#34;
There has always been a sharp question in the industry: is ByteDance creating a matrix of apps, or is it building an invisible operating system? The case of Hongguo leans towards the latter answer.
Zhang Yi also believes that the rise of Hongguo has formed a closed loop from Tomato to Douyin to Hongguo, allowing for mutual traffic flow while each has its strengths, forming barriers.
Hongguo Short Drama is the module that carries the &#34;long narrative form&#34; within this &#34;OS.&#34; Prior to this, ByteDance's attempts in the long video field (Xigua Video) were not entirely successful, as they relied on the old logic of buying copyrights. However, the hundreds of millions of daily active users of Hongguo demonstrate that ByteDance has successfully navigated long narratives with its own OS logic—it does not need to purchase expensive external copyrights but allows internally flowing IPs to bear fruit at the Hongguo node.
For ByteDance, the independent rise of Hongguo also has a layer of strategic security significance: it hedges against the risk of Douyin's traffic peaking.
Every super app has a lifecycle, and Douyin is no exception. When Douyin's daily active users reach a ceiling, the efficiency of its traffic distribution will inevitably decline due to the saturation of advertising loading rates. Hongguo, as an independent app with over 100 million daily active users, means that ByteDance has opened up a diversified battlefield.
This battlefield not only harvested the sinking dividends through a &#34;free model,&#34; but more importantly, it constructed an &#34;immersive consumption space&#34; different from Douyin. On Douyin, users are always ready to swipe away; on Hongguo, users are willing to stay for 15 minutes or even longer to binge-watch dramas. The value of this &#34;deep retention traffic&#34; is also crucial for ByteDance's further commercialization possibilities.
Therefore, the over 100 million daily active users of Hongguo is not just another profitable app; it has begun to possess the ability to seamlessly transfer the same group of users between different apps based on their needs
This is what Tencent, Alibaba, and other giants should be most wary of—ByteDance is building an ecosystem that not only has massive traffic but also closes the traffic loop.
<h2>03 From &#34;Player&#34; to &#34;Super Shelf&#34;</h2>
After becoming a hundred-million-level app, Hongguo's ambitions are clearly not limited to earning advertising revenue. Prior to this, ByteDance was trying to establish Hongguo as the second-largest e-commerce traffic entry point after Douyin, challenging the commercial ceiling of long video platforms.
A shocking data point for the industry is that, according to Dongfang Securities' estimates, the pure advertising ARPU (average revenue per user) of Hongguo's short dramas will reach 29 yuan in 2024, proving its ability to monetize through advertising. Currently, Hongguo is no longer satisfied with simple overlay ads but is starting to test the &#34;Buy Similar&#34; feature.
During the playback of short dramas, the system will pop up a &#34;Buy Similar&#34; link, directly embedding the product page of Douyin e-commerce. Compared to the shouting in live streaming rooms, short dramas provide a more immersive consumption scenario—the female lead's outfits and home decorations naturally have a grass-planting attribute.
Hongguo's e-commerce business is not built independently but fully reuses Douyin e-commerce's supply chain, payment, and logistics systems. This means that Hongguo only needs to be responsible for &#34;front-end traffic,&#34; while &#34;back-end fulfillment&#34; is covered by Douyin e-commerce, achieving extreme synergy within the ByteDance ecosystem.
Hongguo is also expected to take on the important task of helping Douyin e-commerce penetrate lower-tier markets and reach non-live streaming audiences. For those middle-aged and elderly users who do not enjoy watching live-streaming sales but are addicted to plots, Hongguo's short dramas are the best vehicle for sales.
Having over 100 million daily active users seems to be just a milestone; currently, Hongguo's ambitions are also revealing themselves in more areas.
In 2024, ByteDance launched the overseas short drama platform Melolo, attempting to replicate Hongguo's path in the Southeast Asian market: initially using a large number of domestically dubbed dramas to fill content, combined with localized series. By 2025, the overseas short drama market scale is expected to exceed 21 billion yuan, and ByteDance clearly hopes to recreate a &#34;Hongguo&#34; overseas through Melolo, promoting the &#34;free short dramas + e-commerce&#34; model globally.
The current explosion of AI comic dramas is another potential for Hongguo. As Hongguo moves towards 100 million daily active users, the explosion of AI comic dramas is an important technological variable that cannot be ignored.
With the help of ByteDance's Doubao large model and image generation technologies like Dreamina, Hongguo can quickly transform a vast number of IPs from Tomato Novel into &#34;audible, visual, and plot-driven&#34; comic dramas. This format greatly reduces production costs, shortening the production cycle from weeks to days. Zhang Yi added that for the same script, the average cost of comic dramas is 1/8 that of live-action versions.
Genres with expensive special effects, such as fantasy, cultivation, and apocalyptic themes, often become &#34;low-budget special effects&#34; in live-action filming due to budget constraints, but in AI comic dramas, visual expressiveness becomes a strong point.
Through AI comic dramas, Hongguo fills the content vacuum beyond live-action short dramas, not only enriching the content library but also becoming an important testing ground for ByteDance to validate AIGC (Generative AI) in the long content field. Behind the over 100 million daily active users is AI technology gradually taking over some low-end, repetitive content production work
A senior comic drama enthusiast told Wall Street Insights that comic dramas compensate for the grand and splendid scenes that are hard to find in live-action short dramas, allowing many imaginations from online literature to be realized. They can even use tools to create some content that is not available on platforms at no cost.
However, despite the overall rise of short dramas, various issues during the rapid growth process also need to be addressed. According to Zhang Yi, the most criticized aspect in the current market is still the homogenization of short drama content; additionally, regulation is becoming stricter. Therefore, platforms can explore more diverse themes. From a trend perspective, new themes such as cultural tourism and legal education are also receiving relatively good market feedback.
Currently, ByteDance continues to surge. Apps like Hongguo and Doubao have successively surpassed 100 million daily active users, indicating a gradual transition from the &#34;unicorn&#34; stage, which relies on a single hit application, to the &#34;whale&#34; stage, which possesses multiple strong and relatively independent ecosystems.
For ByteDance, this presents a challenge in terms of internal management and coordination complexity, but it is also a tremendous opportunity to build a larger, more robust, and less disruptable digital content empire. Future competition will not only be between ByteDance's products and external competitors but also a race on how to achieve efficient collaboration and co-evolution among its &#34;multipolar&#34; internal teams

Short dramas reaching over 100 million views? Hongguo's "key leap" in the Byte content matrix