Hongguo Short Dramas Reach 168 Million DAU as China's Internet Shifts from Tencent Time to ByteDance Time

[[**ByteDance is using algorithms to drive content and compete for user time, reaching a 40.9% share in July, with Hongguo at 168 million DAU. China's internet may be shifting from Tencent time to ByteDance time.**

**Key points**

**1. ByteDance's time share overtakes Tencent, with Hongguo as the key increment**

In July, Douyin's time share reached 19.4%, surpassing WeChat's 18.8% for the first time; ByteDance overall stood at 40.9% and Tencent at 29.1%; Hongguo's DAU reached 168 million, exceeding the combined total of iQIYI, Youku, Tencent Video and Mango TV, with 125 minutes per person per day.

**2. Hongguo forms an attention loop through free viewing and algorithms**

Free viewing, ad revenue sharing, and coin incentives, combined with 1-3 minute high-twist short dramas, algorithmic feeding, AI supply, Douyin redirects and Fanqie IP, make it an emotion distributor.

**3. Tencent defends with Green Bubble short dramas, but struggles against ByteDance's algorithmic foundation**

Long-video time is under pressure; Tencent uses WeChat's social chain to push Green Bubble and retain traffic; ByteDance has a unified algorithmic architecture, decentralized distribution and no social pressure, so the competitive outlook is not optimistic.

**4. Regulation tightens and minds are affected, but ByteDance's position remains hard to shake**

Short-drama addiction may overdraw dopamine and weaken focus; the September management rules take effect, and Hongguo will take coin incentives offline at the end of December. Short dramas will still explode and show a K-shaped pattern, but more time does not equal more value. 2026-10-26 07:18 The terrifying Hongguo and the ByteDance time of China's internet Qin Shuo's Friends Quick Look

Is China's internet landscape changing? From Tencent's sky to ByteDance's sky?

The reason for raising such a question is that Nomura Securities' September "China Internet and New Media Monthly APP Tracking Report" cited the following data provided by data company QuestMobile:

In July this year, among the Top 50 apps by usage time in China's mobile internet, Douyin surpassed WeChat for the first time, accounting for 19.4% of total time, while WeChat accounted for 18.8%; the entire ByteDance system's time share reached 40.9%, while Tencent's fell back to 29.1%. In July last year, ByteDance's share was 33.6% and Tencent's was 30.9%.

Also in July, the daily active users (DAU) of ByteDance's app Hongguo Free Short Drama reached 168 million, up 107% year on year, exceeding the combined total of the four major long-video platforms Tencent Video, iQIYI, Youku and Mango TV (about 155 million, not deduplicated).

In terms of total user time, Hongguo has become China's fourth-largest app, behind only Douyin, WeChat and Douyin Lite. Hongguo's average daily usage time per person is even more astonishing, reaching 125 minutes in February this year, surpassing Douyin and WeChat.

Although WeChat's daily active users (more than 900 million) still exceed Douyin's (more than 700 million), in terms of user time, is China's internet opening a new order—from Tencent time to ByteDance time, from WeChat time to "Douyin + Hongguo time"?

As content replaces social interaction as users' first time, many people also find that their most relaxed, least guarded and most easily addicted time each day is being occupied by short dramas, a content form that is shorter, more stimulating and more twist-filled.

At the same time, short-drama addiction and attention harvesting have also put Hongguo into heated discussion, just like the debates triggered by Jinri Toutiao and Douyin back then. Some netizens posted screenshots showing average daily use of Hongguo exceeding 10 hours, and "Hongguo short dramas lower intelligence" also trended on Weibo.

"I meant to watch one episode, but before I knew it, it was almost dawn."

"I really need to uninstall Hongguo! I feel dumber and dumber."

Clinical psychology doctors' view on this is that it is not really a decline in IQ, but that the dense twists and hooks in short dramas continuously stimulate dopamine, making the brain passively excited and overloaded, overdrawing dopamine reserves, which temporarily worsens focus and comprehension and creates a feeling of "getting dumber."

What phenomenon is Hongguo? And what time does ByteDance represent?

Why is Hongguo so popular?

The first time I heard of Hongguo was last November at a premium micro-short-drama base in Linfen, Shanxi. The general manager of a cultural company asked me: How long is the boom period for micro-short dramas? Can Hongguo develop further?

Only then did I learn that Hongguo is an app launched by ByteDance in August 2023. It pioneered the model of "free viewing + ad revenue sharing + coin incentives." Users can watch dramas for free and also earn coin rewards through daily check-ins and watching dramas. This forms a sharp contrast with the membership payment and on-demand payment models of traditional video websites.

Each episode of a Hongguo short drama is only 1 to 3 minutes, often dozens or even hundreds of episodes, with themes usually including counterattack, domineering CEOs, revenge, face-slapping, wealthy families, sweet romance, fantasy, power struggles, workplace pain points, and patriotism. The plots are full of high conflict, high twists and high stimulation. Once there is a hit, the algorithm feeds similar plots, and similar content quickly emerges in large quantities.

I often read Jinri Toutiao, and Hongguo frequently pushes traffic there. I downloaded it and uninstalled it after two or three days. First, I felt the plots were too extreme; second, I felt I put in a lot of time but got little nourishment.

To write this article, I downloaded Hongguo again and watched some episodes of "Armed Into Song" and "Emergency Room Slacker King." I felt the content was more diverse than before, and some was quite meaningful and professional and would not "lower intelligence," but it is certain that it takes time and is easy to get addicted to.

Hongguo's explosive popularity seems to show once again that entertainment is human nature. The lower the threshold for content, the stronger the thrill, the fiercer the conflict, and the less brainpower required, the easier it is to become popular entertainment.

This is not a Chinese peculiarity. Short-drama apps featuring "short duration, high frequency, and strong emotion" are currently trending across the global mobile internet. In the US market, the average daily viewing time of the short-drama app ReelShort surpassed that of mobile Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ in the fourth quarter of last year. ByteDance's overseas short-drama app PineDrama, launched last December, had accumulated over 100 million downloads by this September, with about 7 million daily active users.

Compared with foreign short dramas, Hongguo has stronger algorithms, more ample AI content supply, a more powerful platform ecosystem, and, with its free model, has thus developed faster in China, with users spending far more time on it than abroad (ReelShort's average daily user time in the fourth quarter of last year was 35.7 minutes).

First, the algorithm. Hongguo's recommendation capability goes a step further than Douyin's: short videos provide fragmented stimulation, while short dramas provide continuous narrative stimulation, with a cliffhanger at the end of almost every episode, and the demand on viewers is very simple—just "watch one more episode," with a flick of the finger.

Second, supply. According to statistics, from January to August 2026, a total of 430,000 micro-short dramas were released nationwide, 13 times the full-year total for 2025, of which AI-produced dramas accounted for over 90 percent, production costs fell dramatically, and supply is massive.

Third, the ecosystem. When users scroll to short-drama clips on Douyin, they can jump to Hongguo with one click to watch the full series; Fanqie Novel provides a large number of web-novel IPs—among the year's hit short dramas across the internet in 2025, over 60 percent were adapted from Fanqie Novel IPs, and short dramas can also bring a large number of new readers to the original works.

Finally, free. Users do not need to pay to watch; they only need to look at ads. Hongguo sells users' attention to advertisers, monetizes through advertising, and then shares the revenue with creators, forming a closed commercialization loop.

So Hongguo is not an ordinary video app, but an emotion distributor and time absorber driven jointly by free content, algorithmic recommendation, advertising monetization, and platform ecosystem.

On Hongguo, you do not need to find content, nor do you need to know what you actually want to watch; you only know that you are watching Hongguo, and it chooses for you. Based on your dwell time, swipes, completions, and follows, it continuously pushes "electronic feed" to you and gets you used to that more compact attention structure with not a bit of drag. By comparison, all long-form content seems slower, and it is increasingly difficult to win your first minute.

Hongguo does not force you to stay, nor does it require you to commit to watching for tens of minutes; it simply uses "the next episode is even better" to attract you—automatic continuous play, continuous suspense, free viewing, precise push notifications, and coin incentives. These emotional massages greatly lower the resistance to leaving while greatly increasing the probability of retention and immersion.

A comparison of two content ecosystems

Under Hongguo's impact, the usage time of the four major long-video platforms has all declined considerably. In response, Tencent recently launched Green Bubble Short Drama, embedded in WeChat mini-programs, using "green" to counter "red."

Tencent's biggest moat is its social relationship chain, and it also has quite rich content, such as WeChat public accounts, Video Accounts, Tencent Video, Tencent Music, and China Literature, with the content ecosystem and social relationships supporting each other. For years, ByteDance's products—Jinri Toutiao, Douyin, Xigua Video, Fanqie Novel, Qishui Music, Hongguo, and others—have all sought to draw users' time away from social relationships and into algorithm-recommended content feeds. If Tencent cannot hold its ground in content, its social stickiness will also be affected.

So Tencent must do a good job with its content ecosystem. One reason Video Accounts succeeded is that it is based on the social relationship chain: open WeChat and you can see it, and social recommendations such as "friends are watching" help reduce customer acquisition costs, improve conversion efficiency, and keep traffic within Tencent's ecosystem.

If Video Accounts attracts users through plot clips, Green Bubble takes over full-series viewing, and WeChat provides social distribution and advertising monetization, Green Bubble may be able to retain the people in the WeChat ecosystem who would watch short dramas anyway—but can it compete with Hongguo?

Personally, I am not optimistic about this. The main reason is that Hongguo, like many other ByteDance products, is a highly algorithm-driven distribution machine. ByteDance's innate gene is to use algorithms to grasp human nature, and its understanding and control of human nature can be called "peerless."

Starting with Jinri Toutiao, ByteDance has used recommendation algorithms and A/B testing to replace human experience and judgment in traditional content production, with only some improvements still requiring manual analysis and confirmation. Its cornerstone is the algorithm architecture, which, through continuous improvement and huge investment in computing power, has formed a powerful computing foundation that can support multiple front-end apps reusing distribution capabilities. A ByteDance engineer once said that the algorithm architecture is the "bottle," and the user behavior data trained locally is the "liquor": Douyin holds Chinese users' data, and America's TikTok holds American users' data, but the "bottle" is largely the same.

ByteDance's users are living people, but the way ByteDance captures users is algorithmic recommendation; it is like a divine beast fed on data, growing stronger the more it grows.

By comparison, Tencent's gene is social, and Tencent also does content; it is both a content platform and produces some content itself. The original Tencent.com and Tencent News were born in the PC internet era, when the editorial department was still important, and people in the editorial department still had strong control over content, considering taste, orientation, influence, and so on. In addition, Tencent has acquired many content assets (such as Shanda Literature).

Tencent's content ecosystem also uses algorithms, but algorithms were not its original aspiration, not its foundation, and not a unified operating system capable of encompassing all products. To use an analogy, ByteDance pours different liquors out of a single algorithmic bottle, while Tencent has multiple bottles—plastic bottles, glass bottles, metal bottles, and even carefully hand-carved wooden bottles. Different content products each have their own bottle.

Beyond the distinction between one "liquor bottle" (foundation) and multiple "bottles," from the creator's perspective, in Tencent's content ecosystem, top creators tend to get relatively more traffic, and to a certain extent there are still traces of "centralization." Douyin's algorithm, by contrast, is more "decentralized"; its distribution does not depend entirely on how many followers a creator already has—even a new account may win recommendations based on user feedback on a single piece of work.

Finally, WeChat's social relationship chain is certainly very conducive to content distribution, but it also suffers from interference from "social pressure." For example, when you post something on Moments, you consider how others will see it, and whether it would be bad if so-and-so saw it. But when you watch Douyin or Hongguo, it is hard for others to know what you are watching—except for ByteDance, this precise "attention machine."

Looking back at history from today, the past two or three decades have been an unprecedented explosion of digital content in human history. On the production side, the "monopoly" of professional institutions over the right to create has shifted to creation by everyone; on the demand side, audiences have shifted from one-way passive reception to billions of people consuming content online around the clock; and the forms of content themselves have become extraordinarily diverse. In this broad and profound transformation, ByteDance, born in the mobile internet era, was built from birth with algorithms and automated systems at its core, turning recommendation algorithms, advertising systems, creator ecosystems, and paid traffic distribution into an industrial assembly line.

That ByteTime can surpass TencentTime, that DouyinTime can surpass WeChatTime, and that Hongguo's daily active users can far exceed those of iQIYI, Youku, Tencent Video, and Mango, essentially reflects a more "ruthless" machine that nonetheless creates higher efficiency between algorithm-driven content distribution and content supply. This is also a kind of "new quality productive force"; whether this "quality" can represent high quality is a topic in another dimension.

From the "sensational tabloids" of history to today's short videos, both have been defined by elite creators as "vulgar" or "lowbrow," but the "vulgar" naturally has a larger market, and humanity as a whole has not become stupider—a new balance will always be established, and different kinds of content each have their own audiences.

Just as instant noodles did not overthrow proper meals, short videos and short dramas will not kill long-form content. But the impact is indeed strong—Douyin and Hongguo are like building the path of least resistance for the release of human nature: no need to search, no need to choose, no need to pay, pushing "easiness" to the extreme. Under such circumstances, long, deep, specialized, thoughtful content, and content that relies more on real human creation and performance, will inevitably suffer a systemic shock.

Outlook and reflections on "where time goes"

Life is time, and what fills time determines the state of life. When users give more and more of their time to "ByteTime" and hand large amounts of free time over to algorithmic arrangement, they are also ceding part of their initiative, as well as time that could originally have been used for outdoor activities, companionship, learning, socializing, and rest.

If the cognitive bandwidth of hundreds of millions of viewers is long occupied by endless homogeneous short dramas, if people become more and more accustomed to "instant emotional payoff" (although this is also human nature), and if "machines + algorithms," through industrial-scale volume and personalized content for every individual, sweep all before them in the competition for content that delivers emotional payoff, will people's independent thinking and deep thinking be eroded?

As a creator from a traditional media background, such thoughts of mine will certainly be regarded as "old-timer." But I do believe that when users become accustomed to low-threshold, easy instant gratification, and spend large amounts of time every day in high-stimulation, low-choice, hard-to-exit "pleasure," reality will seem more bland and powerless, and one's patience for many things will quietly drain away.

Audiences certainly have their own right to choose, and their pursuit of light entertainment, emotional release, and fragmented diversion is entirely legitimate. The problem is that when machine algorithms direct people's attention toward an unrestrained, unconscious state of content use, and once they leave it they feel at a loss, short dramas occupy not only users' time but reshape users' mentality—how they generate emotions, how they arrange attention, and how they understand the world. The less you need to make active choices, the lower your sensitivity to information quality will become.

Some governance measures concerning "moderation" have already appeared.

Starting September 1 this year, the "Measures for the Administration of the Development of Micro Short Dramas" came into effect, requiring classified filing of micro short dramas, mandatory labeling of AI-generated content, and prohibiting the use of algorithm models that induce addiction or excessive consumption.

On October 21, Hongguo Short Drama issued an announcement declaring that it would phase out the platform's coin feature. Starting November 1, Hongguo Short Drama will no longer provide the coin feature to new users. By the end of December this year, the platform's coin feature will be fully discontinued. (Note: the coin and cash balance rights and interests users have already obtained will not be affected.)

These signals show that Hongguo Short Drama can no longer gallop forward as it did in the past. But history also proves that even with constraints, it is impossible to fundamentally stop audiences' choices. Hongguo will most likely continue to expand.

Looking ahead, short dramas will remain in an explosive phase, and the market may form a K-shaped structure: at the bottom, massive volumes of AI pleasure dramas fill users' time; at the top, a small number of live-action premium works and strong IP works build reputation for the industry. The live-action short dramas in the middle are neither premium enough nor cheap enough, and will have the hardest time.

As for Hongguo, after constraining factors begin to take effect, it will gradually turn from a solitary traffic carnival into a conventional content category, while its leading position in the short drama market will be hard to shake.

Tencent and ByteDance's content war will continue over the long term. Tencent will seek a balance between social and algorithms, and its content has already become partly algorithm-driven. Although from the perspective of total user time, the ByteDance family has surpassed the Tencent family, and Douyin has surpassed WeChat, time is not the only measure of content, nor even the most important one. Exceeding in time does not mean surpassing in value. In premium content, brand trust, and social distribution, the Tencent ecosystem is strong; it is just that in fragmented, high-frequency, low-threshold content consumption, its efficiency is inferior to ByteDance's consistent algorithmic distribution.

In my view, Hongguo users' daily usage time of 125 minutes is good data for ByteDance, but it is not something to be gratified about for users and society. The opportunity cost of 125 minutes is less time in nature, less time reading, less time thinking, and less time with loved ones. This kind of "thrill" comes at a high price, and its impact will last a long time.

I hope ByteDance can use its powerful content stream to take on more responsibility for social value, to make up for the social costs it occupies. In this regard, Jinri Toutiao and Douyin have already made some efforts, with certain results.

I also hope Tencent will still maintain its own persistence in this content world where algorithms run rampant with high efficiency. For ByteDance's machine, human nature is the foundation and the algorithm is everything. Yet in Tencent's content ecosystem, there are still many people-centered, people-responsible choices.

More than a decade ago, Ma Huateng once said, "Sometimes you did nothing wrong; your mistake is that you are too old." At the time, he meant that the mobile internet had arrived, user habits were changing, and following past practices could lead to being eliminated.

This rule also exists in the content world. Zhang Yiming is one generation younger than Ma Huateng, and the content path he chose is a new path built by machines.

In fact, looking at it today, being old is not a mistake; it may be an advantage. Because China is rapidly aging, and the scale of the middle-aged and elderly population is huge, this is the strong base of Tencent's content ecosystem. More importantly, content that can transcend time, classic content, cannot be completed with such simple pleasure-novel and pleasure-drama logic. The immersion brought by classic works and the addiction created by AI short dramas are not the same thing.

The AI era has arrived, and this brings new opportunities and challenges. Where will users' future content time extend? Whose world will it be? The story is still unfolding; let's keep watching. Channel: Games & Entertainment. This content is published with the author's authorization. The views represent only the author and do not represent Huxiu's position. If you have objections or complaints about this article, please contact tougao@huxiu.com. Everyone who is changing and wants to change the world is on the Huxiu APP[ ]