A finance commentator says every AI comic-drama maker in China is losing money, and the platform takes the profit. A 12-billion-view hit shows the audience is real — the question is who gets paid.
Fu Peng, a well-known Chinese finance commentator, made a blunt claim this week: “Everyone making AI comic dramas is losing money — and that’s just in the last three months.” The platform, he said, uses subsidies to draw creators in; once the subsidy period ends, reaching any reader means paying for ads. And after all that spending, the platform still computes each creator’s share tightly — “in the end only the platform makes real money.”
The claim is unverified, but it landed in the middle of a genuine Chinese argument about whether AI-made short dramas are a gold rush or a treadmill. The numbers on both sides are enormous. One AI comic drama about the Song dynasty, “Armed Into Song,” has passed 12 billion views across ten seasons, produced by a team of six people none of whom are film-industry professionals, with about 30 production staff, after 20 days of work for the first season. The Paper’s report on the show notes that the short-drama app Hongguo now claims 168 million daily active users, up 107 percent from last year — more than the combined daily audiences of iQiyi, Tencent Video, Youku and Mango TV.
The hit show is the story of how much an audience can be built this way. Fu Peng’s argument is the story of who captures it. His thesis is that the industry is now in the second half of the pattern: platforms subsidize to attract creators, then the subsidy ends, then creators must buy ads just to be seen, then the platform’s algorithm takes the money back. A post quoting a different creator frames it as simple survivorship: the handful of hits with hundreds of millions of views are few and far between, he said, and most creators invest a lot of money and never get the return they hoped for.
Whether “everyone” is the right word or the exception’s, the economics are in the open now. The site has been following this story from several angles: the 54-year-old creator whose Song-dynasty drama paid off his debts, the student who made 3 million yuan, the studios cutting out entry-level jobs. The Paper’s report that the show’s six-person team is worried about being called a fluke — and this week’s claim from a well-known finance commentator that the whole model is losing money — together suggest the boom’s next phase is a fight over the money, not the audience.
Viewers are adjusting in their own way. One post drew more than 1,100 likes saying that watching a certain AI comic drama about the Ming dynasty felt like “a class in how to govern a country” — a time-traveler explaining macroeconomic theory to a crown prince, with the reader’s brain “running at full speed.”
