All eyes may be on TikTok and its ongoing drama in the US, but it’s not the only killer app in Chinese tech giant ByteDance’s quiver. The Beijing-based company, which has been the focus of concerns in Washington that it is beholden to the Beijing leadership, has developed another streaming service that is dominating the hot new market for micro-dramas (短劇) — TV series cut into bit-sized snippets of between one to 15 minutes.
Hongguo (红果免费短剧) has only been online for about a year and a half, but according to data from analysis firm QuestMobile, it recorded the highest growth rate for 2024 of any Chinese app with over 1 million users. Back in September, as TikTok argued against its ban before a panel of federal appeal judges, Hongguo logged a monthly growth rate of over one thousand percent, light-years ahead of the runner-up’s 27 percent growth rate.
The reason for the app’s phenomenal growth rate is simple: micro-dramas (短剧), produced to professional studio standards, for free. As we’ve written in the past, duanju have become hugely popular in China and the market is growing at a blistering rate. Whereas most of their competitors paywall their content, ByteDance streams them free of charge. “It's so good! I can’t stop watching it!” reads one review for the app on Tencent’s app platform. “And the key is that it’s free!” Other comments on the site point to how the micro-dramas are high-quality, and that the app also allows users to do shopping. This last means the app is still providing the company revenue. Free micro-dramas could be a way to attract users into this revenue stream.
36Kr, the China-based data and publishing company, reported last month that Chinese netizens, tired of forking out every 15 minutes for the next episode, have taken to Hongguo en masse — likely guided there by ByteDance’s multiple other apps. It is perhaps no coincidence that the second and third-highest growing apps of over a million users in 2024 were also from ByteDance.
But the app is now falling victim to its own success — a cycle, one can safely say, of which ByteDance is painfully familiar. Late last month, Hongguo halted posting new videos after attracting the attention of regulators at the National Radio and Television Administration, the ministry-level agency under the CCP's Central Propaganda Department that keeps a close watch on video and audio broadcasting. According to the NRTA’s official report, the agency told Hongguo’s leadership that while they view micro-dramas as playing a central role in enriching people’s “cultural and spiritual life,” several videos they had found on Hongguo’s platform violated their new plans for this enrichment. That is the official code for the need to align micro-dramas more closely with the Party’s mandate to shape public opinion in ways that benefit social and political stability.
Later, the developers said they were overhauling their reviewing standards for short videos. On January 10, they announced that they had removed over 250 videos with “bad value orientation” (不良价值观导向). Expect the sharper edges of the platform to be filed right down when it comes to the exploration of more sensitive — and perhaps interesting — social or political topics.However, it can probably be said that neither regulation in China nor ongoing controversy abroad will detract from the continuing success of the ByteDance media empire. Thanks to apps like TikTok, Douyin and now Hongguo, it’s no wonder that, according to rich list collator Hurun Report, ByteDance’s owner Zhang Yiming topped their list of China’s richest people for the first time at the end of last year. Can anything really touch him, as long as the netizens keep on coming?
