About Hongguo

Hongguo

Hongguo, known through its main application as Hongguo Duanju (Chinese: 红果短剧; pinyin: Hongguo Duanju, also styled Hongguo Free Short Drama), is a Chinese advertising-supported streaming platform dedicated to microdramas. It is part of the ByteDance group and is operated by Beijing Bimo Liuxiang Technology Co., Ltd., a company founded in 2021 and wholly owned by Beijing Douyin Information Service. Introduced inside Douyin in May 2023 and launched as a standalone Android and iOS application in August 2023, Hongguo made short, predominantly vertical-format live-action dramas free to watch, funding them through algorithmic recommendation and in-stream advertising instead of the paid episode-unlock model that then dominated the market. By 2026, third-party measurement by QuestMobile put its monthly audience in the hundreds of millions, larger on a daily basis than China's four major long-form video platforms combined.

Ownership and operating company

Hongguo is operated by Beijing Bimo Liuxiang Technology Co., Ltd., whose name in Chinese is 北京笔墨留香科技有限公司. Reference works describe the company as wholly owned by Douyin, specifically by Beijing Douyin Information Service, which places Hongguo inside the ByteDance group alongside Douyin itself, the Chinese counterpart of TikTok. Chinese media have consistently described Hongguo as a ByteDance product. It has no standalone official website of the kind a conventional broadcaster maintains; distribution is through the Apple App Store and Android application stores, under the developer Beijing Bimo Liuxiang Technology. That app-store-only presence is itself a marker of what Hongguo is: a mobile streaming service built for phones, not a television channel or a web portal.

The platform's staffing and intellectual property came substantially from within ByteDance. Before Hongguo's launch, personnel from Fanqie Novel, ByteDance's free, advertising-supported online literature service, were reassigned to work on short dramas, and the new service received traffic and commercial support from other parts of ByteDance. Hongguo drew on online-literature intellectual property from Fanqie Novel while also acquiring programmes from independent production companies. In 2024, according to Caixin, ByteDance merged its Douyin and Hongguo microdrama teams to streamline content creation, grading projects according to creative quality and particularly favouring adaptations from popular online novels. The result was an integrated chain inside one corporate group: fiction originated or was licensed through Fanqie Novel, promotion ran through Douyin, and viewing happened on Hongguo.

Launch inside Douyin and as a standalone app

Hongguo Duanju was introduced by Douyin in May 2023, initially as a service inside the Douyin application, and its individual mobile application was formally launched in August 2023. The timing placed it in the middle of China's microdrama boom. Microdramas, known in Chinese as duanju, are scripted series broken into very short episodes, often lasting only a few minutes and in many cases under a minute in the wider market, designed for fragmented, phone-based viewing and built around intense, soap-opera-like storylines of romance, revenge, fantasy and family conflict.

Sixth Tone, the English-language publication of Shanghai's Sixth Tone Media, described how ByteDance arrived at a dedicated platform. Douyin, the biggest and most important short-video application in China, had become the main venue for ultrashort dramas, but the business suffered from widespread content piracy. ByteDance eventually decided, in Sixth Tone's account, that piracy prevention was not worth the time and money, and instead adopted an if-you-cannot-beat-them-join-them approach, launching Hongguo as a free ultrashort platform of its own. The application was a success, reaching about 120 million monthly active users within its first year of operation, an audience ByteDance could monetise through in-application advertising rather than through direct payments from viewers.

The free, advertising-supported model

Hongguo's defining decision was to break with the then-dominant commercial model for microdramas. Much of China's commercial microdrama market at the time relied on users paying to unlock episodes, or on advertising campaigns in other applications directing viewers to paid mini-programmes inside platforms such as WeChat. Hongguo instead made series free to watch. Its principal distribution mechanism was algorithmic recommendation, of the kind ByteDance had perfected in Douyin, and its principal monetisation mechanism was advertising shown within the stream, with revenue shared with rights holders. Chinese media noted the similarity to Fanqie Novel's free, advertising-supported business, and Caixin described Hongguo's strategy as unlocking episodes through advertisement views and offering coin rewards to viewers, emulating Fanqie Novel's success.

For rights holders, Hongguo used a mixture of revenue sharing, production funding and intellectual-property licensing, rather than requiring all programmes distributed through the service to be exclusive. By late 2024, The Economic Observer reported that the platform was working with more than 400 copyright partners. Caixin reported that Hongguo had produced over ten dramas surpassing one billion views each in under a year, and that payouts to content partners had exceeded two billion yuan since June 2024. The wider market context helps explain why the model spread: Caixin reported that China's overall microdrama market reached about 50.5 billion yuan, roughly seven billion dollars, in 2024, overtaking China's movie box office revenue, and that platforms were shifting towards free viewing supported by advertising, a model expected to comprise most of the market in 2025 as consumer spending on paid unlocks dropped and marketing costs rose.

Hongguo also operated a points and rewards system, often described as coins or diamonds, under which users accumulated rewards by watching dramas, checking in and completing tasks, and could exchange them for cash. That watch-and-earn element was part of the platform's early user-acquisition strategy, borrowed from the playbook of free reading and short-video applications in China. Its later removal, described below, marked the platform's transition from buying attention to relying on habitual viewing and advertising alone.

Content: from live-action microdramas to a wider catalogue

At launch, Hongguo concentrated on short, predominantly vertical-format live-action dramas, generally consisting of episodes lasting only a few minutes. The catalogue grew quickly. Reports cited in Chinese media put the platform as adding over one thousand short dramas a month and passing fifteen thousand titles by late 2024, combining licensed works from outside producers with productions based on intellectual property from Fanqie Novel and other sources. Over time the application expanded beyond microdramas to include films, television series, novels, audiobooks and comics, turning a single-format application into a broader free entertainment library organised around the same recommendation and advertising system.

The subject matter of the microdramas themselves followed the conventions of the Chinese duanju market: high-stakes romance and revenge stories, fantasy, family feuds and rapid plot reversals, compressed into episodes built for phone screens and interrupted viewing. Because episodes are short and series are numerous, the catalogue model depends on volume and recommendation rather than on a small number of flagship productions. Hongguo's scale, thousands of titles and hundreds of copyright partners within eighteen months of launch, is therefore part of its content strategy, not merely a consequence of it.

From 2025, Hongguo expanded heavily into animated and artificial-intelligence-generated dramas. In November 2025 it launched a separate application, Hongguo Manju, dedicated to that material. The shift mirrored an industry-wide change: at a State Council briefing on 17 September 2026, the National Radio and Television Administration put China's national microdrama audience at more than 800 million users and said 430,000 microdramas had gone online in the first eight months of 2026, thirteen times the total for all of 2025, with AI-generated dramas accounting for more than ninety percent. Trade reporting on Hongguo's own charts found the same pattern in miniature: in May 2026 only two of its top ten titles were AI dramas, while by August AI dramas occupied nine of the top ten slots. ByteDance's position in that shift was strengthened by its own AI video tools; TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew, speaking at a conference in Singapore in October 2026, said he believed the overwhelming majority of short dramas now being produced used AI models, including ByteDance's Seedance.

Audience growth

Hongguo's audience growth was exceptionally rapid by the standards of streaming services. QuestMobile figures cited by The Economic Observer put it at about 120 million monthly active users in September 2024; Caixin, reporting the same QuestMobile series, put the figure at 122 million by September 2024, an increase of more than one thousand percent year on year. Caixin also reported that by June 2024 Hongguo had reached 212 million monthly users on a differently based count it cited, a 179 percent annual increase, marking the first time a microdrama application had surpassed a long-form video platform in users, in that case Alibaba's Youku. The exact figures vary by measurement basis and month, but every series tells the same story: within roughly a year, a service launched in August 2023 had an audience comparable to, and then larger than, platforms that had operated for more than a decade.

By 2026 the numbers had moved to a different scale again. QuestMobile reported about 304 million monthly users for Hongguo in February 2026, at a time when the entire dedicated short-drama application category had about 335 million monthly users, and measured average daily use per user at 125 minutes in February 2026, almost three times the 41.7 minutes recorded for Hemajuchang, the second-largest dedicated short-drama application in that dataset. QuestMobile then reported about 356 million monthly active users in May 2026, up 79.1 percent year on year, and Nomura-cited QuestMobile data put daily active users at 168 million in July 2026, up 107 percent from a year earlier, more than the combined daily audience of about 155 million for Tencent Video, iQIYI, Youku and Mango TV. Later QuestMobile figures cited in trade reporting put Hongguo at about 410 million monthly users in August 2026, representing 87.7 percent of China's dedicated short-drama application audience of 467 million that month, and at about 203 million daily active users in September 2026, surpassing 200 million daily users for the first time.

These figures come from third-party measurement firms rather than from platform disclosures, and different vendors measure differently, so they should be read as estimates of scale rather than audited counts. Even with that caution, Hongguo's position is clear: by 2026 it was the largest single platform in the world's largest microdrama market. QuestMobile counted 851 million de-duplicated short-drama users across all channels in China as of May 2026, and the regulator's figure of more than 800 million users nationally in September 2026 confirms that Hongguo operated in a market used by a majority of China's internet population.

Regulatory intervention in December 2024

Hongguo's growth brought direct regulatory attention. On 25 December 2024, the National Radio and Television Administration's Online Audiovisual Programme Management Department and the Beijing Municipal Radio and Television Bureau summoned Hongguo executives for a regulatory meeting. Authorities said Hongguo had not adequately implemented existing management requirements and that programmes which clearly violated recent regulatory guidance had continued to appear on the service. The intervention followed three notices the Administration had issued in November 2024 targeting specific themes in microdramas.

Hongguo responded the following day. It announced that it would review the dramas available on the platform, remove material found to violate the rules, reassess programmes awaiting publication under revised, stricter standards, and suspend the release of new dramas for five days while the review was carried out. In Caixin's reporting of the statement, the platform said it would also crack down on dramas containing harmful values, violations of public decency, or vulgar and borderline content. Trade reporting later summarised the episode as the platform removing a substantial number of microdramas deemed to violate public order standards. The five-day suspension was short, but the episode established a pattern that has continued across the industry: very fast catalogue growth, followed by regulator-mandated review of content standards, with the largest platform expected to enforce the rules at scale.

Rewards phase-out and anti-addiction measures in 2026

In October 2026, Hongguo announced the phase-out of its points and coin reward system. Reporting of the announcement on 21 October 2026 stated that, starting 1 November, newly activated users would no longer have access to the coin feature or its related entry points, and that the feature would be discontinued for all users by 31 December, ceasing coin distribution entirely. Coins and cash balances already acquired would remain unaffected, with details on redemption and withdrawal deadlines to be announced separately. Alongside the phase-out, the platform announced new rest and sleep anti-addiction reminders, features intended to prompt heavy users to take breaks.

Commentary on the change framed it as an economic recalculation. Hongguo had linked user acquisition and management by moving from coin-driven engagement to free viewing and then to advertising monetisation; removing coins tests whether viewers will continue to return daily without cash incentives, and whether advertising revenue can sustain ongoing content investment. The announcement did not explain the platform's reasons and did not announce changes to the free viewing model itself. In the same period, Hongguo's management publicly addressed the balance between live-action and AI production: its editor-in-chief, Le Li, publicly rejected claims that the platform was abandoning live-action production, and Douyin Group vice-president Li Liang stated publicly in March 2026 that Hongguo was adjusting its minimum-guarantee production mechanism but would continue to strengthen investment in live-action short dramas, distinguishing an adjustment to project cooperation methods from a reduction in total content investment.

Position in China's video market

Hongguo's significance lies in what it did to the structure of Chinese online video. For a decade, the market's centre of gravity was the long-form platforms, Tencent Video, iQIYI, Youku and Mango TV, which competed on expensive licensed and original series and films for paying subscribers. Hongguo, free and advertising-funded, built a daily audience that by July 2026 exceeded those four platforms combined, and an average daily viewing time per user, 125 minutes in February 2026, that rivalled or exceeded long-form viewing. Nomura's app tracking, published in October 2026, found that ByteDance's applications accounted for 41.8 percent of the time users spent on China's fifty biggest mobile applications in August 2026, compared with Tencent's 28.6 percent, with Hongguo ranking fourth among the country's biggest applications, behind Douyin, Douyin Lite and WeChat; Hongguo and Douyin together accounted for much of ByteDance's growth.

Competitors responded directly. Tencent launched Lüpaopao Duanju, a free short-drama service inside WeChat offering live-action, animated and AI-generated dramas free with advertisements between episodes, which reached 143 million monthly active users by August 2026 according to QuestMobile. Even that rapid growth left Tencent's service at about thirty-five percent of Hongguo's monthly audience in the same month. Globally, the market Hongguo leads at home was estimated by Omdia at about eleven billion dollars of revenue in 2025, rising towards fourteen billion dollars by the end of 2026, with ByteDance pursuing the same free model outside China through separate applications. Inside China, however, Hongguo remains the defining product: the platform that proved a free, advertising-supported, recommendation-driven catalogue of minutes-long dramas could outgrow the subscription video industry it was built alongside.