With its unique community ecology and user base, Xiaohongshu is emerging in the field of short dramas. This article will delve into the development trajectory of Xiaohongshu’s short drama business, analyze the secret of the success of its popular short drama “Foolish Love”, as well as Xiaohongshu’s unique advantages and challenges in the field of short dramas.
The short drama track has ushered in another platform player.
On May 19 this year, Xiaohongshu launched a suspenseful emotional short drama “Foolish Love” on the site, and the number of feature films exceeded 520W 24 hours after its launch, setting a new high for the launch of the short drama on the same day. Only 10 days after its launch, the number of discussions and exposures on the site exceeded the Spring Festival hit “What a Good Girl”. As of press time,The short drama has exceeded 8,000W on Xiaohongshu, while the number of views on related topics has exceeded 220 million.
Screenshot of Xiaohongshu
“Fool’s Love” is not the first time Xiaohongshu has explored short dramas.
According to the data of the “2025 China Online Audiovisual Industry White Paper”, the market size of micro-short dramas is expected to reach 87 billion yuan in 2025, and the number of users will exceed 680 million, accounting for more than 75% of mobile netizens. There is no doubt that in the wave of fragmented entertainment of the mobile Internet, the short drama track is undergoing unprecedented industrial fission, and various video platforms, including Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, iQiyi, etc., are scrambling to enter the game in order to occupy a place in this competition for attention. Xiaohongshu naturally does not want to miss this enduring wave.
So why did “Fool’s Love” become popular? How far has Xiaohongshu’s short drama business gone? What are the characteristics of various short drama players?
01 “Fool’s Love”, why can it explode?
From a creative point of view, it is expected that “Fool’s Love” can break through the siege in a number of short dramas and become a hit in the middle of the year.
From the perspective of theme, this short drama is not limited to common sweet pets or relatively routine modes such as revenge and counterattack.Instead, it constructs a composite structure of “stand-in literature + suspense + sadomasochism”.
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After the male protagonist Gu Haoxun and his brother Gu Hao both fell into the sea, Gu Haoxun approached his sister-in-law Ye Zhixia as a “soul piercing” after waking up. This sense of suspense brought by the emotional conflict and identity puzzle of stand-in literature not only satisfies the audience’s need for emotional tension, but also leads users to continue watching in curiosity through suspense elements. In addition to the sadomasochism of this stand-in literature, the presentation of “morbid beauty and moral struggle” in the play, the emotional bonds and subtle relationships between different characters, also touch on family ethics and human dilemmas, adding a dimension of thinking beyond entertainment to this short drama.
Screenshot of Xiaohongshu
From the production level, as the first 4K vertical screen short drama on the whole network, “Fool’s Love” uses cinematic expression techniques, paying special attention to light and shadow, and composition, bringing users an excellent audio-visual experience, coupled with exquisite scenes, exquisite service, as well as the full and three-dimensional character shaping and natural and meticulous acting skills of each character in the play, all of which make this short drama have a texture that comes to the face.
From the perspective of narrative rhythm, this drama efficiently arranges strong conflict plots and key reversal points within a limited duration of 1-3 minutes per episode, and also shows the motivation and growth trajectory of the characters through multi-line narratives, which not only easily attracts the attention of users, but also allows them to immerse themselves in the drama.
Screenshot of Xiaohongshu
Overall, when many short dramas on the market have been criticized for many reasons such as routine stories, low production costs, flat and exaggerated characters, “Foolish Love”, which has made breakthroughs at multiple levels, is tantamount to giving short drama users a new experience, and it is not surprising that it has exploded.
In addition to its own reasons, the popularity of “Fool’s Love” and Xiaohongshu’s adaptability in the short drama business are inseparable.
02 Xiaohongshu’s short drama road
Let’s first look back at the development trajectory of Xiaohongshu in the short drama business.
In 2023, the phenomenal short drama “Escape from the British Museum” will explode on the whole network, and it will also set off a high degree of dissemination and discussion on Xiaohongshu, which verifies the natural adaptability of the Xiaohongshu community and the content of short dramas with high emotional concentration and strong cultural attributes. At the same time, Xiaohongshu also tested the content supply in the form of a “collection of short drama notes”, allowing creators to split episodes into single episode notes, and users can watch them continuously through the drop-down bar. At this time, the platform is still in the testing stage of short dramas.
In June 2024, Xiaohongshu held the Shanghai Micro-Short Drama Conference in Shanghai and announced the launch of the “Potato Field Drama Light Project” to encourage talents to release exclusive short dramas through creative incentives and traffic support, which quickly activated the community ecology.
On January 22 this year, Xiaohongshu’s official account officially announced the official launch of the short drama channel, and on the same day, the short drama Spring Festival file was opened, and 100 short dramas were launched, of which 10 were exclusively produced, and all of them adopted the free viewing mode, and a number of leading short drama labels chose to settle in Xiaohongshu. In order to cooperate with the launch, Xiaohongshu adjusted the page layout, placed the short drama channel in the front position of the platform’s “Discover” column, and set up an opening page to guide users to jump, which marked the official upgrade of the short drama from the edge to Xiaohongshu’s strategic business.
Screenshot of Xiaohongshu
Watching the first batch of works launched by it, covering themes such as sweet pets, costumes, revenge, intrigue, and female entrepreneurship, accurately matching the preferences of young female users on the platform. Among them, the best result is “Falling into the Spring Night” distributed by Fengmang, which tells the story of the daughter of a wealthy family who returns for revenge after being assassinated by her adopted daughter adopted by her parents, with the film-level texture and the topic effect of the actors’ six matches, the number of views on the station exceeded 10 million in the 48 hours of launch, and the number of views exceeded 50 million during the Spring Festival, and the total number of views has reached 81.54 million.
Screenshot of Xiaohongshu
After the Spring Festival dramas, Xiaohongshu took high-quality content as its core strategy, and successively launched a number of high-quality short dramas. For example, during the 520 period, in addition to the release of “Foolish Love”, there were also “She Long Knowed”, which tells the story of female revenge, the book-wearing short drama “007 Through the Strange Story” with the theme of campus suspense and two-way redemption, and the refreshing heroine skit “Daughter of Eve”. Recently, Xiaohongshu has ushered in the summer file of short dramas, among which the exclusive youth short drama “About Me and My Rival with the Same Name”, which was launched on June 24, has a current broadcast volume of nearly 3,000W. At the moment of the topic #Xiaohongshu Short Drama Summer File, there are currently 76,000 discussions about multiple summer short dramas, with 110 million views.
Screenshot of Xiaohongshu
From the perspective of theme, Xiaohongshu’s short dramas revolve around the aesthetic preferences and emotional needs of female users, and thus extend a number of themes. From the production level, with “Fool’s Love” as a typical representative, Xiaohongshu intends to create a high-quality short drama with a more cinematic texture.
In addition to cooperating with well-known boutique short drama labels, Xiaohongshu also joined hands with the FIRST Surprise Film Festival to jointly launch the [Red Mirror Short Drama Project] in June. FIRST Film Festival is a famous film festival in China, which has cultivated outstanding young directors such as Wen Muye and Shao Yihui in recent years. The plan recruits from two tracks: short dramas and scripts, providing a million prize pool (including 1 million dark horse short dramas), Xiaohongshu’s tens of millions of traffic support, as well as the official resources of the FIRST Film Festival and famous directors and producers, introducing more cutting-edge creative forces to the filmization and quality of the short drama industry.
Xiaohongshu’s short drama business has its obvious unique advantages.
On the one hand, Xiaohongshu has young women in high-tier cities as its core users, and this group of people has a natural sensitivity to issues such as emotions, social issues, and growth, providing an accurate audience base for short drama themes. At the same time, the characteristics of high consumption and high education make them have higher requirements for the production quality of short dramas, which not only pushes Xiaohongshu to continue to make efforts in the direction of high-quality short dramas, but also has fertile living soil for more short dramas with novel themes and well-made, such as “Foolish Love” accurately touches the desire of female users to explore complex emotional relationships.
On the other hand, Xiaohongshu’s strong social attributes and the model of “one viewing and discussion” provide a unique communication soil for short dramas.
It is understood that in “Fool’s Love” was fully updated within 4 days. During this period, Xiaohongshu will launch user interactive tasks with different themes every day, thereby stimulating the audience’s spontaneous discussion of the plot. In addition, the main creative actors in the play will also take the lead in chasing the drama on Xiaohongshu, which further stimulates the audience’s enthusiasm for chasing the drama.
There is no doubt that in the community environment of Xiaohongshu, short dramas are not only content consumption objects, but also users’ social currency. The multi-dimensional discussion on the plot forms secondary communication through “long comments-likes-forwards”, which continues to drive the popularity of short dramas, and the outbreak of related secondary content also helps the on-site data performance of short dramas. At the same time, Xiaohongshu short dramas can also resonate with the active subcultural circles such as “Pure Love God of War” and “Stand-in Literature” on the site, and accurately reach the goal through topic tags, thereby breaking the circle.
03 Can Xiaohongshu make a short drama?
Before Xiaohongshu, the river of short dramas was already full of players from all walks of life.
Among them, the rise of Byte’s red fruit short drama can be called an industry miracle. This vertical platform, which was only launched in 2023, has exceeded 140 million monthly active users by November 2024 with the traffic support and free model of Douyin Group, and is currently the largest free short drama platform in China. The linkage with the IP of Tomato Novel not only reduces copyright costs, but also increases the probability of hits through the secondary development of mature IPs.
Screenshot of the red fruit skit
According to Tech Planet, since its launch, Hongguo has covered more than 90% of the short drama content in the industry, with more than 10,000 short dramas on the shelves, accounting for more than 20% of the industry’s head content, and more than 1,000 new dramas every month. Statistics show that since the beginning of the year, there have been as many as 16 “billion-level” short dramas on the platform.
In addition to the number of short dramas and the number of explosive models, Hongguo short dramas are also constantly advancing in the direction of high-quality products.
On July 2 this year, Hongguo Short Drama released the “Fruit Burning Plan” high-quality short drama list, covering science fiction, anti-fraud, intangible cultural heritage, action adventure and other innovative themes, 21 high-quality short dramas will be launched in the second half of the year. As early as the end of last year, Hongguo short dramas have officially launched the “Fruit Burning Plan”, which provides income guarantee for high-quality short dramas with two cooperation models of investment support and high-quality promotion. Under a series of support policies, a number of applauded and popular short dramas have been born on the Hongguo platform, such as “Inside and Outside the Home”, which was launched in March this year, with more than 1 billion views in 3 days, and the current number of views on the whole network exceeds 5 billion.
Screenshot of the red fruit skit
As an early leader in the short drama industry, Kuaishou launched the first account sharing policy for creators in the micro-short drama industry “Starlight Plan” in 2020 to encourage more creators to devote themselves to short drama creation; In 2021, the high-quality short drama label “Starlight Short Drama” will be launched, committed to creating high-quality short dramas, and short dramas such as “Donglan Snow” and “The Eldest Princess is on Top” have gained good reputation and playback. In 2023, with the help of short dramas, its annual marketing revenue will rise from 2.06 to 18.2 billion yuan, becoming a new growth curve. In 2025, its strategic focus will shift to the AI product “Keling”, and during the Spring Festival, it will launch the world’s first AI unit drama “New World Loading”, which provides a new paradigm for the industry to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
Bilibili, which started with the second dimension, has focused on the field of animated short dramas.
In the first quarter of 2025, the monthly turnover of Bilibili’s animated short dramas exceeded 10 million yuan, and the total quarterly turnover reached 25 million yuan, with a quarter-on-quarter growth rate of nearly 140%. Since 2025, thousands of authorized online articles have been changed into animated short dramas by the UP master of Bilibili. At the end of May this year, UP owner @Roundtable Animation released an animated short drama video adapted from the online article “I Save the Villain Alone”, which attracted more than 45,000 users to pay to “charge” to watch.
@圆桌动漫 Screenshot of Bilibili
In June this year, Bilibili officially released the animation short drama support policy [Awakening Plan], providing production cost subsidies and charging flow proportions and tens of millions of traffic exposure for UP owners, MCN agencies and animation short drama production companies, aiming to increase the production capacity of animation short dramas through industry cooperation.
Source: Bilibili
In addition, long video platforms such as Tencent Video, Youku, and iQiyi have also increased the business priority of short dramas, and attracted content parties to enter the game by giving producers more say and profits.
For example, iQIYI officially entered the field of micro-short dramas last fall, launching “micro-theater” and “short theater”, “micro-theater” mainly based on vertical screen content, and “short theater” mainly based on horizontal screen content. At the same time, the platform has changed the business model of micro-short dramas, no longer adopting a single point payment model, but exclusively for VIP members, and sharing more than 70% of the revenue to content producers.
In 2025, iQIYI will launch a plan of 1,000 high-quality micro-dramas and a plan of 100 high-quality short dramas, with content types distributed in diverse themes such as costumes, sweet pets, urban romance, history, and suspense, and also aim at high-quality creation, in order to create a benchmark project.
Among the entrants, “belated” Xiaohongshu has formed its own entry point for short dramas with its user advantages and unique community ecology. However, while the advantages are obvious, its disadvantages are also obvious:
In terms of content supply, although Xiaohongshu is accelerating the supplement, there is still a big gap with the 10,000-level inventory of the head players; Except for some short dramas with more than 10 million views, many short dramas have only hundreds of thousands to millions of views – although “Foolish Love” has broken the circle through movie-level texture, many contents are still at the level of “coolness” and lack of in-depth topics; In terms of functional design, the entrance of the short drama channel is not conspicuous, and there is a lack of search function in the channel, and many short dramas are nested on the homepage of talents in the form of “note collection”, which has a high entry cost and the user experience still needs to be optimized urgently; In addition, the use scenario of Xiaohongshu is still mainly focused on “search + grass planting”, which contradicts the immersive viewing habits required for short dramas, and does not have obvious advantages in traffic acquisition.
Judging from the current situation, the short drama market still contains unlimited opportunities. As a latecomer, Xiaohongshu may still have the opportunity to occupy a world in the short drama market if it can continue to output hits at the level of “Foolish Love”, form a short drama impression of “women’s high-quality content”, and continue to optimize the platform’s short drama viewing experience.
