An Analysis of Development Trends for Micro-short Dramas on New Mainstream Media Platforms

(Xuexi.cn Learning Platform Co., Ltd., Beijing 100010)

Abstract

[Objective] Since the era of intelligent media began, micro-short dramas have gained widespread popularity among users. However, their dissemination models exhibit lag, necessitating the identification of new distribution channels that match their characteristics. [Method] New mainstream media platforms can actively explore the micro-short drama sector, leveraging advantages such as government resources, in-platform self-media and creator resources, and rigorous content quality and artistic standards review to empower the industry. [Result] New mainstream media platforms can serve as new distribution channels and collaborative partners for micro-short dramas, achieving mutual growth and prosperity. [Conclusion] Based on cooperation with micro-short dramas, new mainstream media platforms can act as catalysts for the industry, promoting high-quality development of the micro-short drama sector.

Keywords: New mainstream media platforms; Micro-short dramas; Communication advantages; Development trends; Cooperation models
Classification Code: G230
Document Code: A
Article ID: 1671-0134(2025)03-82-04
DOI: 10.19483/j.cnki.11-4653/n.2025.03.017
Citation Format: Wang Zhe. An Analysis of Development Trends for Micro-short Dramas on New Mainstream Media Platforms [J]. China Media Technology, 2025, 32(3): 82-85.

1. Current State of Micro-short Drama Development

1.1 Paid User Base

Current payment methods for micro-short drama consumption include platform membership purchases, single-episode purchases, platform top-ups, and unlocking content through incentivized advertisements. Survey data indicates that 41% of respondents pay to watch micro-short dramas, with over 70% of these paying users spending more than 50 yuan per month. In 2020, the National Radio and Television Administration added a fourth category—"online micro-short dramas" (abbreviated as "micro-short dramas")—to its key online film and television drama information filing system, which previously covered only online dramas, online films, and online animations. The Administration defines micro-short dramas as online film and television works with single episodes shorter than 10 minutes. Today, micro-short dramas are beloved by users for their ability to meet diverse needs including fragmented time utilization, "quick-view" preferences, immersive experiences, and social interaction. However, the industry must remain vigilant about issues such as the singular pursuit of "satisfaction points," character stereotyping, emotional sensationalism, and traffic-driven production tendencies.

1.2 Industry Market Outlook

Capital investment serves as the primary driving force for content production, market promotion, and technological innovation in the industry. The entry of internet giants like Tencent has brought substantial financial support to micro-short dramas, improving project success rates and attracting numerous leading film and television institutions and cultural enterprises. In 2023 alone, 22,500 new micro-short drama-related companies were registered, representing a 20.17% year-on-year increase, bringing the total number of existing companies to 78,100 [1]. According to predictions by third-party platform DataEye, the streaming investment scale will reach 42 billion yuan in 2024 and exceed 83 billion yuan by 2027 [2]. Data from iResearch Consulting shows that despite challenges from tightened policies, upgraded user demands, and market competition, the market size is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan within the next five years [3].

1.3 Mature Operating Models

Micro-short dramas demonstrate strong stability and profitability in terms of production costs, production cycles, and investment risks. The industry chain comprises three main components: production, distribution, and derivative markets. The production side consists of content providers, primarily PGC (Professionally Generated Content) and MCN (Multi-Channel Network) institutions, with monetization through platform subsidies, content payments, and copyright sales. Distribution channels generate revenue through advertising fees and user payments, while derivative markets primarily monetize through user purchases of goods or services.

1.4 Commercial Platform Preference

Commercial platforms have played a pivotal role in the rise and development of micro-short dramas, particularly after recognizing their enormous potential and increasing investment in the sector. Major long-form and short-form video platforms including iQiyi, Youku, Tencent, Kuaishou, and Douyin have launched and continuously optimized their support programs. These initiatives encompass funding support, traffic promotion, content development, talent cultivation, and commercial cooperation, providing more opportunities for content creators and fostering a prosperous creative ecosystem. This has also attracted more commercial capital and industry chain participation, driving rapid sector development.

2. Communication Advantages of New Mainstream Media Platforms

New mainstream media platforms are defined as large-scale media platforms under direct Party committee leadership that actively shoulder mainstream public opinion guidance responsibilities, possess proprietary platforms and stable user bases, disseminate mainstream culture and values, maintain robust news information production, aggregation, and distribution capabilities, and have mature business models, distinguishing them from commercial social platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou. Examples include Xuexi.cn, Mango TV, and CCTV Video. While micro-short dramas have matured on emerging platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou, their distribution through new mainstream media platforms that have deeper policy understanding and closer government relations remains in its infancy. Although CCTV Video and some provincial-level broadcasting platforms have begun exploring this sector, they remain in the experimental phase. The positioning of new mainstream media platforms should be service-oriented, providing creators with a broad stage for distributing, broadcasting, and promoting quality content. Their advantages manifest in four key aspects.

2.1 Precise User Reach

New mainstream media platforms boast large user bases and extensive coverage, enabling them to host more diversified content. They can utilize distinct distribution mechanisms and personalized intelligent algorithms to deliver different types of micro-short dramas to different user groups more accurately. This classification-based distribution significantly increases content viewership. The platforms' social attributes create strong bridges between creators and users, providing direct communication opportunities and incentivizing high-quality content production. Through user-creator interactions, tight community relationships form, enabling more effective content dissemination [4]. Platform-based audience segmentation and cultivation also benefit other project promotions and commercial operations.

2.2 Fulfillment of Main Responsibility

New mainstream media platforms differ fundamentally from other traffic-driven platforms by maintaining higher standards for content quality, artistic merit, and value expression. Under platform review and incentives, micro-short dramas can achieve greater improvements in content quality, artistic level, and value guidance, ensuring works align with mainstream social values and people's cultural needs. Qualified platforms can deepen their involvement in content review and industry standard formulation, creating demonstration effects, enhancing industry self-discipline, and establishing norms to promote healthy, orderly development.

2.3 Optimization of Micro-short Drama Creation Ecosystem

Ordinary platforms typically require micro-short drama producers to "purchase traffic" to guarantee viewership, with this "streaming investment" cost accounting for over 80% of total production expenses. New mainstream media platforms can build a complete creator ecosystem matrix, attracting numerous institutions and outstanding creators while maintaining autonomous control over revenue-sharing ratios. This approach eliminates profit-driven distribution, ensures content safety, better incentivizes creators, and fosters a healthy profit ecosystem for micro-short drama projects—a key distinction from other platforms.

2.4 Enhanced Guarantees

Service Provision: Platforms can offer comprehensive service guarantees including legal consultation, copyright protection, talent cultivation, and exploration of secondary creation, providing robust support for healthy industry development. Financial Support: Through policy support and funding measures, platforms can encourage more traditional film and television companies and leading online literature platforms to enter the sector, reduce operational costs for industry clusters, incentivize innovation, and strengthen high-quality content supply. Technical Collaboration: Platforms can cooperate with producers to learn advanced international technologies, such as one-click horizontal-to-vertical screen conversion and other features that enhance user experience, achieving true interconnectivity and mutual reinforcement to promote high-quality development [5]. Guidance Functions: Platforms can leverage dual guidance through public opinion and artistic criticism to guide users toward quality micro-short dramas, allowing more new users to appreciate the unique appeal of premium content.

3. Development Trends for Micro-short Dramas on New Mainstream Media Platforms

Following the release of policies including the "Opinions on Promoting the Prosperous Development of Short Drama Creation" (December 2022), "Notice on Further Strengthening Management of Online Micro-short Dramas and Implementing Creation Enhancement Plans" (November 2022), and "Latest Work Instructions on Micro-short Drama Filing" (June 2024), the state has standardized macro-level review policies. Micro-short dramas will undergo tiered review based on investment scale, ensuring content quality and standards through mandatory reviews. As regulatory systems improve and audience demands evolve, the industry will gradually transition from its "breakneck growth" phase toward refined content and precise industrial development, with slower total volume growth but a higher proportion of high-quality content, entering a healthier and more orderly development track.

3.1 Promotion of Main Theme Propaganda

Since 2024, the National Radio and Television Administration has launched the "Moving with the Era, Connected with the People" outstanding micro-short drama exhibition and broadcasting campaign, proposing to shift market allocation mechanisms from traffic promotion to content creation. This marks a new stage of mainstream integration for micro-short dramas. Regional and commercial platforms have actively launched brand activities to promote industry transformation. Hunan Satellite TV's "730 Damang Theater" became the nation's first micro-short drama theater brand to enter prime time, while Dragon TV launched the "China Micro-short Drama Quality Oriental Plan," creating a daily broadcast exhibition belt—Quality Oriental Micro Theater. The baton of main theme content has been passed to micro-short dramas. As a batch of main theme micro-short dramas emerges, new mainstream media platforms can seize this opportunity to support creation teams and leverage their unique advantages on this new track.

3.2 Integration with Cultural Tourism

The "micro-short drama + cultural tourism" integration model is gradually maturing. This fusion enriches micro-short drama genres while driving traffic to local tourism resources. Several prospects for this traffic generation model include: First, leveraging established relationships between mainstream media platforms and local cultural tourism departments to integrate local resources and establish effective mechanisms for more influential content. Second, creating iconic check-in locations through micro-short dramas to continuously attract tourism consumption and promote local economic development. Compared with long-form dramas, short dramas can deeply cultivate specific audiences and create influential IPs [6]. Third, exploring joint operation models with mainstream media platforms and landmark resources to one-click push local hotels, accommodations, and catering services to potential users, providing immersive experiences and new growth points for cultural tourism [7]. Fourth, integrating intangible cultural heritage elements provides an important source for content innovation, representing a new trend in cultural tourism integration.

3.3 Integration with Traditional Culture

Combining micro-short dramas with traditional culture represents a promising direction. Traditional culture-themed micro-short dramas can be built around specific elements such as calligraphy, painting, dance, opera, cuisine, and folk customs, allowing audiences to experience the unique charm, aesthetic enjoyment, and emotional resonance of traditional culture. Traditional culture conveys information through emotional communication, national consciousness, and value identification, which can trigger audience resonance, transmit emotions, enhance cultural confidence, and promote cultural inheritance [8]. Collaboration can be considered with traditional culture channels or columns on mainstream media platforms and their self-media to create new IPs, enabling micro-short dramas to spread Chinese culture, spirit, and values, and serve as an "amplifier" for "telling China's stories well and spreading China's voice effectively," enriching the contemporary connotation of excellent traditional Chinese culture [9].

3.4 Promoting "Going Global" to Enhance International Communication

Supporting micro-short dramas is crucial for enhancing soft power in international communication, building new external communication patterns, and achieving quality works "going global." Locally produced micro-short dramas have achieved breakout success in overseas markets. In international communication, macro-narratives lacking consideration for cultural differences and audience habits may result in "cultural discount" phenomena, while micro-short dramas "going global" can break this pattern. Through "small切口" and "storytelling" approaches using narratives easily understood by overseas audiences, micro-short dramas can enhance exchanges and understanding between Chinese and foreign civilizations and find cultural proximity [10]. Under new international communication environments, policy support helps micro-short dramas continuously go abroad, creating new concepts and expressions that bridge China and the world, thereby enhancing China's international discourse power. However, Chinese institutions cooperating with overseas media platforms face potential crises of value distortion under capital dominance. Mainstream media platforms can leverage their cooperation experience with foreign platforms and content review expertise to guide and orient dissemination content.

3.5 Exploring Mutually Beneficial Business Models

Brand-customized micro-short dramas have become a trend with considerable market scale and strong profitability. The "micro-short drama + brand" integration model creates new bridges between brands and consumers while enhancing platform influence and generating new revenue growth points. New mainstream media platforms can combine their content tone, audience demographics, and distribution methods to launch brand-appropriate micro-short drama businesses, actively selecting suitable brands and content to facilitate strategic tripartite cooperation among platforms, brands, and creators, forming a win-win model. The next step involves promoting more exchanges and cooperation between micro-short dramas and government departments, enterprises, and brand institutions under the auspices of new mainstream media platforms, exploring more replicable and scalable business models to empower multiple industries and achieve mutual benefits.

3.6 Platform Upgrades Through User Interaction

The process of watching micro-short dramas fully releases users' strong interactive demands, with 91.6% of users engaging in interactive behaviors [3]. Common interactions include liking, bookmarking, and commenting, with insightful comments providing valuable suggestions for platform and content optimization. Over half of users also share or recommend content, and platforms can leverage these convenient sharing behaviors to increase user acquisition, retention, and conversion rates. Furthermore, platforms can obtain valuable feedback for performance improvements through micro-short dramas, thereby better serving users. Cross-media experiences, interactivity, immersion, and emerging technologies will become future development directions for micro-short dramas to strengthen their characteristics and attract more audiences. As mainstream media platforms, it is essential to plan matching dissemination strategies based on new-era contexts, technological development levels, and micro-short drama content to identify new cooperation paths and development trends.

4. Responsibilities of New Mainstream Media Platforms in Micro-short Drama Dissemination

Although micro-short dramas require "satisfaction point" construction using elements like "time travel" that main melody films cannot employ, new mainstream media platforms can help find a balance. The primary consensus should be that the first principle for micro-short dramas to achieve breakout success is not "satisfaction sensation" but "emotion"—the ability to emotionally comfort audiences [11]. From this perspective, emphasizing emotion over satisfaction may be the future creative direction for main melody micro-short dramas and the foundation for their broadcast on new mainstream media platforms. Additionally, these platforms should promote content type expansion, enrich narrative content, strengthen story logic, and establish cooperative models based on content characteristics and platform types to facilitate smoother collaboration between production and broadcast parties [12].

4.2 Providing Solutions to Problems

No industry can sustain reckless growth indefinitely, and the booming micro-short drama sector is no exception. While most micro-short dramas excel at attracting audiences and generating active interaction, the deep effects of cultural and propaganda content are rarely realized. Interactions remain largely at the superficial level of entertainment, with insufficient development of knowledge absorption, educational transmission, and aesthetic cultivation functions. Many commercial platforms still have problematic practices like inducing payments that may affect healthy industry development. New mainstream media platforms must recognize these issues, leverage their user interaction advantages to guide deeper understanding of micro-short drama content, and transform micro-short dramas into a new position for "uniting and inspiring people" and "shaping customs and gathering hearts." They should truly adopt a "people-centered" and "user-centered" approach, providing sufficient nourishment for micro-short dramas to expand innovation while meeting user aesthetic needs. In payment processes, they must protect user rights, avoid manipulative tactics, and implement genuine measures to ensure transparent consumption and earn user respect and trust.

4.3 Guidance in Face of Doubts

As micro-short dramas transform and cooperate with new mainstream media platforms, requirements will inevitably increase. Platforms must prepare to take responsibility, communicating with regulatory authorities and guiding users. They should distinguish between good-faith artistic criticism and malicious online "takedowns," accepting and correcting valid criticism while standing firm against baseless accusations and malicious speculation, clarifying right from wrong and guiding public opinion.

4.4 Standardizing Industry Disorder

The rapid development of the micro-short drama industry has revealed normative deficiencies in certain industry chain segments. First, the industry chain lacks standardized transaction processes and quality assurance mechanisms. Due to extremely short industry cycles, most production institutions can only review partial scripts during transactions, making comprehensive quality assessment difficult and potentially affecting final content quality. Second, platforms serving as traffic intermediaries in the midstream face challenges in controlling the downstream promotion and distribution segments. Finally, from a regulatory perspective, the short duration but high episode count of micro-short dramas creates high review costs and long cycles that cannot fully match the industry development pace, potentially creating regulatory blind spots and reducing industrial efficiency. Therefore, new mainstream media platforms can help the industry explore more complete self-regulatory mechanisms, provide constructive input on industry standard formulation, and build a cleaner, healthier industrial space.

References

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Author Introduction: Wang Zhe (1984—), male, from Shanxi, holds a master's degree and is a senior editor at Xuexi.cn Learning Platform Co., Ltd. His research focuses on media convergence, public opinion research, and online communication.

(Responsible Editor: Li Yansong)