Yuewen Group Launches Paid Short Drama App Qidian Theater with IP-Focused Model

Yuewen Group on July 7 officially launched Qidian Theater, its first video app focused on IP-adapted series, targeting premium short dramas and AI comic dramas. The app adopts a pay model combining ad unlocks and membership subscriptions. It leverages Yuewen’s massive IP library, covering mainstream web novel genres such as urban, fantasy, sci-fi, suspense, romance, and infinite loop, including AI comic dramas and AI simulation short dramas. Currently, the “Editor’s Pick” channel has 13 short dramas, and the “Otherworldly Start-up Guide” channel has 6 short dramas. Qidian Theater uses a virtual currency system called “JuDian”, with 1 RMB equaling 100 JuDian, and different packages offer bonus points. Payment options include single-episode unlock and full-series subscription. For example, the drama “My Wife, Not Quite Right” has 65 episodes, with charging starting from episode 10; unlocking all episodes individually costs about 8.7 RMB, while the whole series package is 499 JuDian (about 5 RMB). New users receive 888 JuDian as a registration bonus, and daily check-ins accumulate about 200 JuDian. The platform also launched the “IP Wish Plan”, where user votes trigger production upon reaching the target. Currently, six novels have reached the required vote count: “Lan Ke Qi Yuan”, “Lan Bai She”, “Da Yi Ling Ran”, “Die Ying Feng Yun”, “Xue Ba De Hei Ke Ji Xi Tong”, and “Zhou Lin”. On the supply side, Qidian Theater has opened an adaptation cooperation channel for over 100,000 IPs to film studios and individual creators, offering a three-tier incentive of “guaranteed minimum plus permanent revenue sharing plus periodic ranking”, and has released a creation tool called “DramaBuddy”. Since 2026, the short drama industry's competitive landscape has shifted. From January, Red Fruit canceled its universal guarantee of 200,000 to 350,000 RMB, real-person drama earnings per 10,000 views dropped from about 100 RMB to 5-10 RMB, and the revenue share coefficient for AI simulation short dramas was adjusted to about 60%. In February, the top 100 comic dramas saw a view increment of 7.587 billion, with Red Fruit's daily new comic dramas far exceeding real-person dramas, peaking at a 20-fold gap; its standalone product “Red Fruit Comic Drama” app reached 8.54 million MAU in the first month. In May, ByteDance introduced a 1.5 billion RMB real-person drama subsidy budget and released Seedance 2.0. In May, Kuaishou announced 800 million RMB for diversified revenue sharing, investing 200 million RMB in cash to incubate premium series and 1 billion RMB in traffic pool to support premium content. iQiyi upgraded its revenue sharing mechanism in January, Youku launched vertical short drama incentives in April, Tencent Video introduced a brand fund support program, and Taobao launched an “AI Drama Million Incentive Plan”. In 2025, Yuewen saw a surge of 400,000 new writers and over 800,000 new novels, with 42 billion new characters written. Qidian Reading MAU remained stable at the tens of millions level. After entering the comic drama space in October 2025, Yuewen launched nearly 1,000 AI comic dramas within the year, with over 100 exceeding 10 million views and 12 exceeding 100 million views; AI comic drama revenue surpassed 100 million RMB. As of July 2026, Yuewen’s comic drama business had adapted over 1,000 web novels into AI comic dramas, with 367 exceeding 10 million views and 46 exceeding 100 million views. Yuewen CEO Hou Xiaonan stated at the March 17 earnings call that the company will launch no fewer than 200 short dramas in 2026. Previously, Yuewen’s short dramas and comic dramas were mostly distributed on third-party platforms such as Douyin and Tencent Video. The launch of Qidian Theater shifts Yuewen from an “IP licensor” to an “IP self-researcher and self-channel distributor”.