In “The China Experiment of AI Micro-Drama: Who Is Making Money After Production Costs Approach Zero?”, I discussed the macro-level distribution of benefits in the industry. The fundamental conclusion at the time was that as tools matured and production costs dropped lower and lower, the money paradoxically did not stay in the hands of creators — it was captured by platforms and paid traffic channels. After that article was published, many people asked: if I’m a complete newcomer with no industry background, and I see Hongguo Short Drama blowing up, can I still get into this?
The previous article was about where the money flows. This one zooms in on something closer to home: if you jump in right now, is there actually still a chance.
In the past, for an ordinary person wanting to make micro-dramas, the barriers were as high as a wall. Where to find suitable scripts and IP, how to contact reliable actors, how to deal with production companies, and after filming, how to sign contracts, settle payments, and handle compliance with platforms — for an outsider, it was all a complete black box.
Now, platforms like Hongguo are turning these fragmented and complex intermediary processes into standardized products. For newcomers, the physical friction of getting started has indeed been minimized.
But that doesn’t mean you can make big money here effortlessly. The platform smoothing the entry path for you doesn’t mean what lies ahead is risk-free wealth. Hongguo is fundamentally a content production and distribution orchestrator: script submissions, IP selection, director and actor matchmaking, project contracting, data dashboards, contract signing, and payout withdrawals — all centralized into a single backend.
The more cleanly it eliminates operational hassles, the more starkly the core and hardest competition is laid bare: whether your drama is actually entertaining, and whether your judgment of what hooks the audience is accurate.
For newcomers, what matters is not how proficiently you can operate a few AI video generators, nor how high the revenue split numbers the platform advertises are. What matters is understanding exactly where you sit in this assembly line, and whether you can feel out the rhythm of the market at an extremely low cost.
Hongguo Free Short Drama’s massive presence today stems from its overwhelming user base advantage. According to QuestMobile data cited by CBNData, in January 2025, Hongguo’s monthly active users had already reached 166 million, leaving competitors in the same track far behind — the runner-up, Hema Theater, had only 37.66 million MAU at the time.
A couple of months later, the snowball kept rolling. According to a report by PEdaily, QuestMobile statistics showed Hongguo’s MAU surpassed 173 million in March 2025, only 12 million short of Youku at the time. And in data later disclosed by Sina Finance, Hongguo’s MAU surged further to 275 million, while by comparison, runner-up Hema Theater’s MAU had only inched up to 47.2 million.
With such a massive user base, the platform holds absolute sway over traffic allocation. According to 21st Century Business Herald, starting from May 2025, Hongguo’s daily active users had already surpassed those of other major online video apps. Competitors in the same track saw their survival space severely squeezed — by October, runner-up Hema Theater still only had about 50 million MAU. This also explains why, within the industry, it has become the norm for creators to sign exclusive contracts with Hongguo.
To handle this enormous supply, the platform naturally began consolidating the supply chain. According to The Paper, the Douyin Group’s short drama copyright center and the Hongguo Short Drama Creation Service Platform have been merged into a unified “Short Drama Creator Center.” Screenwriters, directors, actors, and copyright holders can all verify their identities on this platform. From IP screening and script submissions, to production matchmaking in the middle, to the final steps of playback data review, contract signing, and settlement — tasks that once required countless phone calls and meetings with endless intermediaries are now all aligned within this backend, like snapping together building blocks.
For newcomers, this is the door. It encapsulates the previously fragmented traditional film and television workflow into a standardized product, so you can submit your work to the platform without knowing any industry big shots.
Once you enter this backend, the first thing to figure out is what role you’re here to play. The platform provides many different identity certifications.
If you can tell stories and have a wild imagination, you can submit scripts, contribute as a studio writer, or adapt web novel IP. Here, you don’t need to know anything about camera angles or shot movement — your entire skill lies in how to throw out a hook in the very first episode, or even the first three lines, and how to make viewers want to keep tapping after the first ten episodes. Your core job is to capture what makes a topic or emotion click with the audience.
If you have experience in the physical film and television industry and can organize a crew to shoot, on this backend you can serve as a production contractor. The platform will assign completed scripts to you through its project matchmaking mechanism. At this point, what you should be thinking about is absolutely not cinematic texture — it’s how to control costs, how to deliver on schedule, how to ensure the film passes content review safely, and how to get payments back as quickly as possible.
If you can’t shoot at all but are familiar with AI video and editing tools, you can create AI animated dramas, edit raw footage, or even produce sample episodes. The advantage of using AI is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money assembling a crew — you can piece together short video samples alone in a room at extremely low cost, maintain visual consistency and character appearance continuity, and probe market trends at lightning speed.
If you have a keen sense for traffic metrics and understand how to run paid ads and calculate ROI, you can also become a distributor or paid traffic specialist, boosting box office through testing different ad creatives. For you, the core is knowing when to cut losses and when to pour more money in.
For those just looking to enter, the biggest taboo is jumping in blind — funding your own crew from the start, or borrowing money to buy traffic. Before you have any certainty, writing stories and using AI to make sample episodes is the asset-light approach that suits you.
Many people are drawn to micro-drama by the astonishing revenue-sharing numbers.
To secure high-quality scripts at the source, the platform is indeed generous with its policies. According to 36Kr, in August 2025, Hongguo introduced a script rating policy that classifies scripts into six tiers, from A- to S++. If a script is rated at the highest tier, S++, the creator receives a guaranteed base payment of 200,000 RMB, plus a 40% revenue share.
The total capital pool in the industry is also substantial. According to Time Finance, Hongguo’s guaranteed script payments range from 40,000 to 200,000 RMB, and the highest revenue share ratio is indeed 40%. In just the three months from August to October 2025, total revenue payouts to script creators reached 189 million RMB. Additionally, a report by Xinhua Net noted that because revenue sharing for screenwriters and actors was implemented, everyone’s income is now directly tied to the market performance of their work — and the total monthly script revenue share exceeded 70 million RMB in October alone.
These real figures in the tens of millions and hundreds of millions can easily give newcomers a false confidence — the belief that as long as they can write something and it passes review, that money is guaranteed to land in their pocket.
In reality, the key to 40% is not how high the percentage is, but what base it’s multiplied against.
How much you ultimately take home is determined by several multipliers: you have to see how large the actual recharge and consumption volume of the drama really is; how much intermediary channel cost the platform deducts when calculating net distributable revenue; what tier your script received in the rating system; and whether you even have the qualifications to sign directly with the platform.
It’s like running a business. If a drama gets poor market feedback and no one is willing to pay to watch it, then even if the contract says 40% or even 100% revenue share, you still end up multiplying by nothing. The platform’s rating and revenue-sharing rules are merely an invitation to enter — whether you actually get paid ultimately depends on whether your story can perform in the market.
So the revenue split ratio can be understood this way: it tells you how much the platform is willing to share with a work that breaks out, but it does not tell you the probability of a work breaking out. For a newcomer, the real question to ask is not “Do I have a shot at getting 40%?” but rather “Can I, at a low enough cost, keep experimenting until I produce a few things that get a market reaction?” These two questions sound similar but are fundamentally different. The first is looking at the contract; the second is looking at your capability.
This is exactly where AI truly enters the conversation. AI is not a machine that automatically turns 40% into income — its value lies in driving down the price of trial and error. In the past, to validate a concept, you might have had to recruit people, shoot, edit, and front the money. Now you can first use AI to make a sample, or even several different versions, to see if the platform and users respond. After dissecting the revenue split ratio, what really matters next is: how much cheaper has AI made this trial-and-error process, and has it changed the ultimate probability of a breakout hit?
In many people’s telling, AI has become a universal key for ordinary people to overtake on the curve. But the reality often diverges sharply from the hype.
AI has indeed lowered the barrier of on-location shooting — which previously cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands — to the level of one person moving their fingers in front of a computer. The physical production cost of visuals has indeed approached zero. But the problem is, if you can use AI to make it, so can everyone else. When the internet is flooded with thousands upon thousands of micro-dramas with near-zero visual production costs, consumer attention becomes the scarcest resource.
And this brings another cost. According to a report by Securities Times, while the spread of AI has crushed the shooting and post-production costs of micro-dramas to rock bottom, traffic acquisition costs have been climbing wildly. Today, for a micro-drama project, spending on paid traffic typically accounts for roughly 70% of total gross revenue. Even for highly seasoned professional teams who laboriously run a full project cycle, the final ROI is generally only 1.03 to 1.07.
In other words, making content has gotten cheaper, but the barrier to getting content in front of an audience has gotten higher. The flood of content generated by AI has ultimately tightened the grip that platforms and traffic-buying channels hold.
If your only advantage is knowing how to click a few AI tools and generate some decent-looking visuals, the platform doesn’t need you — you’re entirely replaceable. What the industry has no shortage of now is videos that anyone can casually generate; what it is sorely lacking are stories that truly strike a chord with people and are genuinely compelling. AI merely speeds up your execution; it cannot judge what your audience is thinking on your behalf.
The most useful thing about AI is actually that it lowers the financial risk of experimentation. If you have a novel idea, you no longer need to spend months of preparation and tens of thousands of yuan to shoot a pilot — instead, in a few dozen minutes and a few yuan’s worth of electricity, you can use AI to put together a sample to submit to the platform. It’s a high-efficiency sandbox that lets you get rapid feedback within what you can afford to lose. But if you think AI auto-generation alone means you can kick back and rake in money, reality will likely teach you a lesson.
Faced with the call of the Hongguo Creator Center, should you actually make a move? You can weigh your situation against the following scenarios.
If you treat micro-drama as a high-intensity training ground for skills, hoping to sharpen your control over content pacing, audience hooks, and narrative triggers, then it’s worth giving it a try. The precondition is that you start with an extremely low — even zero — financial cost approach, such as only submitting scripts or only using AI to make samples and do some editing. These require no upfront cash outlay, let alone taking out loans.
In the process, you can get real test data from the platform’s grading of your submissions or from partner feedback — essentially trading an extremely low cost for valuable industry intuition. At the same time, you need to have your own discernment about storytelling, and be mentally prepared for the reality that out of 10 projects, only 1 might take off. For you, this is like a low-cost proving ground, honing your content instincts through continuous rapid feedback.
But there are pitfalls you absolutely must avoid.
If all you can think about is that 40% revenue split on the S++ rating contract, but you have no idea how much gets deducted from the payout formula in traffic acquisition costs and various channel fees, I suggest you cool down first. Or if you’re currently tight on cash and urgently need a stable monthly fixed income, then the micro-drama industry is absolutely not for you. It’s a business that depends on hit probability, and it offers no one a stable base salary.
As for jumping in by fronting your own money, hiring actors to shoot physical live-action, or paying out of pocket for traffic — before you understand the platform’s recommendation mechanism, you’ll likely lose everything nine times out of ten. Similarly, if you’ve picked up a few video generation tools and think that years of accumulated expertise from traditional film and television teams in scriptwriting, dialogue, and emotional conflict can be dismissed overnight — or if you can’t sign directly with the platform’s backend and can only rely on various intermediary payout agencies for settlement — you should stop immediately as well. In an environment of opaque information, it’s very difficult to get your true earnings.
The supply chain consolidation by platforms like Hongguo and the proliferation of AI tools have not eliminated the brutal elimination rate of this industry. The majority of the money will still be earned by top-tier teams who control traffic and have the capacity to produce hits at high frequency.
But that doesn’t change the fact that it is an excellent, extremely low-cost personal sandbox. Here, you don’t need to beg any big boss, and you don’t need to front hundreds of thousands — you can take your creative ideas and stories into a market with tens of millions of monthly active users, run them, and see if you can get real user feedback. Use a cheap way to fail fast, while simultaneously validating and training your market intuition for content. That is the most solid value an ordinary person can get behind this door.