Creator Xu Fei earns nearly one million yuan in revenue share on Hongguo with AI comic dramas, at a per-title cost of about 2,000–3,000 yuan

At midnight, in a rented apartment in Xiangcheng District, Suzhou, the only sound is the whir of the computer fan. Xu Fei watches the AI video generation progress bar finish, then drags everything into the editing software. Before eight tomorrow morning, at least five episodes have to be produced first.

Xu Fei's AI short drama, which just took home nearly 800,000 yuan in revenue share, came out of this space of less than ten square meters.

Every day, tens of thousands of new episodes go live on Hongguo; hundreds of millions of viewers are hooked on Hongguo, and creators' livelihoods depend on Hongguo too. The platform needs both to contribute traffic and content.

Xu Fei is embedded in this massive internet chain. Starting as a creator with zero foundation, he leveraged a production cost of about 2,000 to 3,000 yuan per drama into a profit share of several hundred thousand yuan.

As a creator who has reached the mid-tier in less than half a year in the industry, Xu Fei doesn't think he's achieved anything spectacular.

He left school before finishing middle school at 14 to work. His only experience related to film and television production was a stint as a day-labor security guard at the Beijing Film Festival.

Having endured a youth themed around "survival," Xu Fei's desire for money is stronger than most people's, and it has also made him unusually sensitive to every potential opportunity.

"I started doing internet work at 20. I didn't understand anything then—I just heard people say the internet was a fast way to make money."

A brash man of grassroots origin with no education, no background, and no fallback—his greatest advantage is that he dares to act and dares to charge ahead. He believes imperfect action beats ten thousand perfect thoughts.

More than a decade ago, the internet also happened to favor young people like him first.

His experience of life at the bottom made him clearer about what the lower-tier market likes to watch. Xu Fei also had timing, geography, and people on his side, becoming one of the first to catch the traffic wave on the internet. He did IPs, wrote articles, and ultimately anchored himself in short-video marketing accounts, feeding off traffic with hundreds of matrix accounts, reaching a monthly income of a million yuan in his early twenties.

In that period, every time he opened his phone he could see traffic earnings of 10,000 yuan a day. Xu Fei had never imagined money could come so easily.

He had never had many hobbies, and suddenly rich in his early twenties, how to spend the money became the biggest problem. When the traffic downturn hit, Xu Fei began to panic, and ultimately decided to go trade stocks, hoping for a doubling of his assets.

But this time, luck was not on his side.

Four years passed in a flash. The liquor and pharmaceutical stocks Xu Fei bought with his savings were wiped out after endless waiting. To make matters worse, several of his properties were also bought at the peak. At the same time, Xu Fei sensed that the internet was getting harder and harder to do.

"I was foolish to a certain degree back then. Suzhou had purchase restrictions—one person could only buy one property—and I was still bidding against people at a foreclosure auction, winning a property at a high price."

Wealth rolled in and then receded like the tide. In just a few years, Xu Fei felt that the money he'd made by luck had been lost entirely by his own doing.

One of the properties Xu Fei bought at the early peak, now down sixty percent

Everyone knows success requires timing, geography, and people, but no one can precisely grasp the methodology for replicating success.

After all the timing and conditions have dissipated, the vast majority of people will never recover. But in Xu Fei's view, the first rule of replicating success is having the courage not to fear starting over.

His character trait, forged through survival, is that he refuses to admit defeat. He wants to make money and isn't afraid of hardship or toil, nor of starting from scratch.

On the eve of entering the comic drama space, fate handed him a familiar script.

After starting AI comic dramas, Xu Fei's work pattern shifted to starting work at 8 p.m., going home to sleep at 8 a.m., waking at nightfall, and repeating like an ascetic—no socializing, no rest, and no holidays whatsoever.

Since starting AI comic dramas, Xu Fei has spent every 24-hour day like this, shifting between day and night.

"There wasn't much startup cost at first. I just rented a shared studio near my home for 3,500 yuan, pulled in a computer, and started right away."

Entering the industry with zero foundation, Xu Fei chose the most conservative approach: find one investor for each drama. Following the model of others putting up the money while he does the work, he made his first drama with 5,000 yuan in startup capital.

When it comes to making money, Xu Fei has always been a combination of hard worker and pragmatist. His entrepreneurial approach is to strive to keep costs to a minimum and then leverage the highest possible profit.

Xu Fei's daily work environment

Because he originally came from short-video marketing accounts, he has an internet sense and knows editing. It took him just two or three days to learn the entire AI production process. The first drama he made earned only the 500 yuan incentive from the platform. Although he didn't make much money, he had learned and run through the entire AI comic drama process.

Xu Fei has no attachment to production, only a desire to make money. Next he began batch production, producing three short dramas in 19 days.

Some people make money through insight, others turn their fortunes around through execution. Those with sufficiently clear goals can always smell the scent of wealth first.

02

The Hongguo assembly line never stops

"Most of the short drama scripts on Hongguo come from Fanqie Novels. Fanqie's copyrights are all open for creators to use. The platform gives short drama creators and novel authors a proportional share based on traffic—essentially, we're all working for the platform."

Since higher traffic means higher income, choosing a good story is the foundation of everything.

Xu Fei's principle for choosing scripts is, first, to prioritize what everyone likes to watch, and second, to differentiate himself in an already crowded competition.

He knows that the competition in cultivation and quick-transmigration series aimed at younger audiences is fierce—everyone is either competing on length or production quality. Dramas aimed at the lower-tier market—simple, relaxed, humorous stories with a moral—are relatively more favored by middle-aged and elderly viewers.

Facts have proven that the path Xu Fei chose was indeed wise. Right now, the viral Hongguo meme "you have to set the rules first before you can stop the heartburn" comes precisely from this kind of urban, plot-driven, moral-reasoning short drama.

Moral-reasoning urban drama, a typical representative genre on Hongguo

But the production process also involves certain uncontrollable factors.

During production, Xu Fei discovered that the large-model training of AI video tools is bound to draw from reality, which means that giving a specific instruction now will produce a specific face—for example, instructing it to generate "a Song dynasty official standing on a city gate tower" will most likely generate Lei Jiayin.

Content with such obvious face-blending is destined to fail the platform's copyright review; even if you spend money to make it, it can only be treated as unusable footage.

When making his first drama, generating video with the cheapest AI tools still cost about two yuan per second. Xu Fei decided to first learn how to do it before discussing image quality. As long as he had paid to generate the footage, in his view none of it was unusable—when making his first drama, even if the AI generated a person with four legs, he would still put it in the film.

After figuring out the process, he began building his own production pipeline to keep costs as low as possible.

Currently, the platform's regulation of face-blending has become stricter

For an average 50-minute drama, computing power costs 600 yuan, plus 800 yuan for gacha draws. Xu Fei's nearly ten short dramas have total views in the billions, and after achieving a single-drama high of over 100 million views, his hit-show revenue share also reached nearly one million.

Unlike creators who have refined requirements for production, what he wants is short, quick, and plain—pursuing the most direct data and returns.

In his spare time, Xu Fei likes to browse the creator group chats to see how everyone is doing. On the same pipeline, it's clear that many peers are not having an easy time.

"The vast majority of viewers have no emotional attachment to creators; they're just following the plot. Fanqie's scripts are available to everyone, so of course whoever updates faster and can cut the story clearly is the one people watch."

Making mass-produced short dramas on Hongguo requires racing for speed; Fanqie Novel's scripts are open-source and anyone can use them. If one person runs a script into a small hit with a few episodes, peers can generate a thousand episodes the next day.

As a fast-food consumer product, short drama is a race: whoever can get viewers to watch the rest of the plot while they are most interested in the show seizes the initiative.

Pacing that is too slow is a common phenomenon for many people after switching careers. Artistic creation and having an internet sense are not the same thing. Whether Hongguo users like watching what you make is one matter; whether they can understand it is another.

"More professional people in traditional industries will make texture and details very well—for example, the first 20 seconds are black, then it starts drizzling, and the camera slowly cuts to a person pacing slowly. It really is immersive, but viewers don't have the patience to wait that long for you. You'd be better off opening with a thunderous line."

Knowing how to set a hook at the very start of a video, using the first 3 seconds to keep people there, and controlling the pace through editing to make things clear—these are the basic skills Xu Fei developed from his past work running marketing accounts.

More and more people are entering this track, and the lowering of production barriers has made competition more direct.

Xu Fei believes that behind the ability to generate traffic, many abilities cannot be quantified. How to edit so viewers can understand, how to master narrative pacing—these are skills not all creators can grasp, and he does not recommend that any complete novice blindly enter the industry.

"If you don't know how to edit, or have never worked on the internet, forget it. I only recommend these three types of people make AI comic dramas: those who have done self-media, those who have done novel recommendation videos, and those who have done movie commentary. Even people who traditionally make short dramas—I wouldn't recommend they get into this."

Xu Fei also never believes that just because he has made a few successful dramas, he has mastered an effective formula for making money.

"If you ask whether I have a methodology for making short dramas, actually I do, and it's very simple: just look at what notices the platform issues every so often and what it suggests creators do. Finding industry trends is actually very simple—just follow the platform."

He just hopes that while this business can still be done, he can complete as many works as possible and earn the money he should earn.

Insiders see the craft, outsiders see the revenue share

From the small screen to real life, for Xu Fei personally, the success in front of him will not make the future certain; he still needs to live a life with day and night reversed.

He has tried to free himself from this work. The job posting for an assistant has been up for several months, but there has been no response.

"OPC is done, but I'm trapped here. I probably can't replicate my abilities in others. Look at me working day and night with my schedule reversed—it's just that there are fewer people queuing to generate videos at night. After all, every day I open my eyes to the 120 minutes per month I've guaranteed the platform, and I don't even have time for interviews."

Starting November 1, Hongguo's new rules take effect: incentives for completed dramas lean more toward 90–180 minutes; long dramas over 300 minutes and high-speed updated long serials no longer have an advantage. On the platform, rules are always changing, and new dramas go online every day. Some break 100 million; some sink to the bottom.

As of August 2026, the Hongguo Short Drama App had 21.66 million daily active users, 411 million monthly active users in the same period, and an average daily usage time per person of 156.9 minutes.

Behind these astonishing numbers, viewers cannot even remember the names of the dramas, let alone the creators behind them. Creators like Xu Fei are all hidden within the vast macro data, hidden in late-night studios.

Xu Fei is extremely clear about this. He does not pursue art or a representative work, and cares even less about whether he can be remembered.

He has never had any particularly clear dream. For him, work does not need to carry too much meaning beyond making money.

"I'm just a robot. The story belongs to someone else, the production relies on models; I just help turn other people's stories into video. If one day comic dramas become hard to do, I can go make movies—as long as I can make money."

This article comes from the WeChat public account "Wenduji," author: Sixi, editor: Luzijia, published by 36Kr with authorization.