LayarHijau – China’s booming short-drama market has reached a striking new milestone. Hongguo Short Drama (红果短剧) recorded 168 million daily active users (DAU) in July 2026, according to the latest QuestMobile data cited by Sohu Entertainment.
That figure is higher than the combined 155 million daily active users recorded by four of China’s leading long-form video platforms: Tencent Video, iQIYI, Youku, and Mango TV. Hongguo therefore recorded roughly 13 million more daily active users than the four platforms combined.
Next articles
The numbers offer a notable snapshot of how dramatically short-form entertainment has expanded in China, particularly as the country’s long-form drama market faces a tougher summer season.
Users Are Spending More Than Two Hours a Day on Hongguo
Hongguo’s growth is not limited to its expanding daily user base. QuestMobile data shows that users spend more than 125 minutes a day on the platform on average.
The platform had already demonstrated strong user engagement in 2024, when average daily usage reached around 1.39 hours per user. At the time, that figure had already surpassed the usage time of every individual long-form video platform.
The latest numbers suggest that short dramas are capturing a significant amount of viewers’ daily screen time, even though individual episodes are typically only a few minutes long.
Why Short Dramas Are So Easy to Keep Watching
Sohu Entertainment attributes part of the difference to the way audiences make viewing decisions.
Watching a long-form drama typically starts with a specific choice. Viewers may open a streaming platform because they have decided to watch a particular series, which comes with a relatively high time commitment. If the opening episodes fail to live up to expectations, viewers may simply abandon the show.
Short dramas operate differently. A viewer can open a story immediately, watch for a few minutes and move on to another title if it fails to hold their attention. The cost of trying something new is therefore extremely low.
That makes short-drama platforms particularly suited to fragmented pockets of free time. Users do not necessarily need to arrive with a specific title in mind. They can simply look for something entertaining and keep scrolling through different stories.
The result is a viewing pattern that may initially seem contradictory: individual episodes are extremely short, yet users can spend more than two hours a day on the platform overall.
DAU Does Not Equal the Number of Drama Viewers
The 168 million figure needs to be viewed in the proper statistical context.
DAU, or Daily Active Users, refers to users who are active on a platform on a given day. It is not the same as MAU, or Monthly Active Users, and it does not represent the number of unique people who watch dramas.
Hongguo’s DAU figure can also include users who open the app for activities such as daily check-ins or incentive-based tasks. As a result, the 168 million figure should not be interpreted as 168 million people watching short dramas every day.
The same applies to the combined 155 million DAU of the four long-form platforms. That figure does not represent 155 million unique viewers watching long-form dramas.
Instead, the comparison illustrates the scale of daily user activity across the two types of video platforms.
Long-Form Dramas Still Have a Place in China’s Market
Hongguo’s surge has come at a challenging time for China’s long-form drama market.
Nearly 40 drama series premiered during the 2026 summer season. According to Yunhe Data estimates cited by Sohu Entertainment, however, only three managed to maintain an average per-episode playback level above 20 million during their peak periods. Mystic Nine (2026) (九门) was the only title to surpass 30 million.
The overall daily playback market for long-form dramas also struggled to break through 180 million and fell to around 121 million toward the end of August.
Still, those figures do not mean audiences have turned their backs on long-form storytelling.
Long-form dramas continue to offer things that short dramas are not designed to replicate, including more layered character development, extended narratives and deeper explorations of social and real-life themes.
Several long-form series that generated attention through the strength of their storytelling also demonstrate that audiences remain willing to commit their time to longer productions.
The bigger shift, then, may not be a simple battle between short dramas and long-form series. Instead, Hongguo’s rise highlights how the way audiences discover, choose and consume video entertainment is changing.
A single short-drama app attracting 168 million daily active users—more than the combined DAU of four major long-form platforms—is a particularly striking indicator of how much audience time the format has managed to capture.
For China’s broader entertainment industry, the challenge is not simply determining whether short dramas will replace long-form series. It is figuring out how traditional long-form platforms and producers can adapt to an audience whose viewing habits, attention patterns and expectations are rapidly evolving.
