绿泡泡能撼动红果吗?
Can green bubbles shake red fruits?
Content Summary
It will at least take traffic away from other short drama mini-programs within WeChat. Text | Wang Yuchan Editor | Qiao Qian Source | 36Kr Future Consumption (ID: lslb168) Cover source | Official page screenshot Recently, a new app called “Green Bubble Short” quietly appeared in WeChat
Recently, a free short‑drama mini‑program called “Green Bubble Short Drama” quietly appeared in WeChat, and its account is owned by Tencent.
On the mini‑program homepage, there is a “Green Bubble Short Drama” section, or you can directly access it by searching “short drama” on WeChat. Video accounts support attaching episode jump links, and searching the relevant drama name in QQ Browser will also show recommendation slots. Users can complete the entire flow from watching to sharing within the WeChat ecosystem without jumping to any third‑party product.
36Kr screenshot
Within the platform, users can perform actions almost identical to those on Video Accounts: like, comment, favorite, forward to friends or groups, with support for floating and mini‑window playback; the homepage bottom features a “Swipe” entry, and sliding up or down enters an immersive recommendation stream.
Currently, Green Bubble’s content covers three major categories: live-action dramas, AI dramas, and comic dramas. The homepage features lists such as Daily New Releases, Must‑Watch This Week, Reputation Rankings, and Hot Search Rankings, as well as recommendation slots like “Friends Are Watching” based on social connections and “You Might Like” based on user preferences.
These short‑drama contents are not produced by Tencent—Green Bubble uses a “joint distribution” model, integrating episodes from external short‑drama mini‑programs into the official content pool, without handling the production process itself.
The business model is the standard IAA: all episodes are free to watch, with ads inserted between episodes, and revenue comes from advertisers rather than user payments. Video‑channel snippets drive discovery and traffic, while the mini‑program handles full episode continuation and ad monetization.
Since Green Bubble’s launch, many short‑drama companies have seen notable gains. On October 9, the Shenwan Media sector rose 5.28% in a single day, with a turnover of about 54.3 billion yuan, and 15 stocks hit their daily limit: Chinese Online, Mango Super Media 20 cm hit the limit, Huace Film & TV rose over 11%, Jieceng Co. rose over 10%, Xinhua Media, Shanghai Film, Zongyue Technology, and Ciwen Media 10 cm hit the limit.
Internet media analyst Chen Zemin believes that the emergence of Green Bubble sends a positive competitive signal to the market, creating a turning point for short‑drama CPs whose voice had been extremely weak due to “Red Fruit’s monopoly.”
Facing a competitor that already holds an absolute leading position in the short‑drama market, can Green Bubble get a bite of Red Fruit’s fruit?
WeChat: From Opening Big Mall
To Opening Own Store
Looking purely at the product and content itself, Green Bubble has nothing particularly outstanding. It didn’t even have a launch event or any hype. Its biggest advantage may be that it is a “WeChat official short drama mini‑program”.
Tencent has done short dramas before, but this is the first time WeChat is “personally” stepping in. Until now, WeChat only acted as infrastructure and a channel—setting rules, providing traffic, charging service fees—so users who wanted to watch short dramas on WeChat had to do so through various content‑provider mini‑programs or Channels.
In June last year, WeChat launched an official “short drama” mini‑program, but it was only a low‑cost incremental channel in the free‑app market. In October 2026, that entry point was replaced by Green Bubble.
Zeng Xianru, founder of third‑party short‑drama research firm GrowData, believes that, given WeChat’s historical restraint in commercial matters, this move can be understood as: the WeChat team finally recognizing “short drama” as “content”, not merely “traffic”.
“WeChat’s previous role in the short‑drama market was ‘opening the market, renting the storefront’, letting others sell their own products inside. Now it wants to open its own store, and at that point it’s no longer just about traffic,” Zeng Xianru said. “Running a mall and running a self‑operated store are completely different businesses.”
When you produce short‑drama products on WeChat, the advantages and disadvantages are both very clear.
Receiving a friend’s message while watching a drama can easily interrupt the experience. Moreover, WeChat’s DNA is acquaintance‑based social networking, so liking a drama will let friends know you’re watching it, and users may feel a psychological burden when giving feedback.
But “acquaintance social” has two sides. “There are bad dramas and good dramas. When you see a good drama, you want to share it. The ‘share’ power of WeChat remains a trump card,” Zeng Xianru said.
The “Friends are watching” entry on the Green Bubble homepage and the one‑click sharing to group chats and friends are acquisition channels that independent apps like Hongguo find hard to replicate—Hongguo relies on sign‑ins, tasks, and collecting coins for watch time, while Green Bubble can directly tap into WeChat’s existing social graph.
Zeng Xianru also believes that Green Bubble’s entry point is still somewhat deep, “ideally it should be raised to the first‑level ‘Discover’ interface.” The hierarchy of the entry point determines the traffic ceiling, which is also a signal of WeChat’s determination: back then, the Video Channels grew to today’s scale precisely because they were gradually moved to the “Discover” page.
Early data shows that the product‑format challenge has not deterred users. WeChat disclosed that users watching through the official Green Bubble mini‑program spend about five times the average session length and have a retention rate more than 2.5 times the average. “Average” refers to the overall data within the WeChat ecosystem, including third‑party mini‑program short dramas.
Accompanying this is a fairly sincere incentive policy. According to the WeChat Open Platform’s Q4 2026 “Micro‑Short Drama” mini‑program incentive activity announcement, from October 16 to December 31, for high‑quality new dramas launched within 7 days and ranking in the top‑5 for daily monetization revenue with the highest user watch time, a 100% high‑share revenue split will be granted for the following 7 days.
WeChat announcement screenshot
The assessment metric has shifted from the industry‑standard view count to average watch time per user—its orientation is very “WeChat‑style”, encouraging long‑form quality content that retains users rather than click‑bait, fast‑food short videos.
Red Fruit’s moat
The Green Bubble’s Hidden Cards
To answer whether “the green bubble can shake the red fruit,” we must first understand the position of the red fruit before discussing the word “shake.”
QuestMobile monitoring data shows that by July 2026, ByteDance’s red fruit short‑video standalone app had 168 million daily active users, a year‑over‑year increase of 107%—a figure that already surpasses the combined daily active users of the four major long‑video platforms Tencent Video, iQIYI, Youku, and Mango TV (about 155 million).
According to QuestMobile, the red fruit’s monthly active users rose to 356 million in May 2026, with an average daily usage time of about 125 minutes per user.
Red Fruit short drama daily active users have already exceeded the combined total of four major long‑video platforms (source: QuestMobile, July 2026)
Red Fruit’s lead is not only in user scale. On the traffic side, in the first half of 2024, ByteDance’s advertising engine accounted for 73% of short‑drama ad spend, Tencent Ads 17%, and Kuaishou 8%; on the content side, Red Fruit has signed long‑term contracts with top production companies, making new content hard to flow to other platforms. The “free watch + ad revenue sharing” business loop, a mature traffic‑generation industry chain, and a leading user mindset together form its moat.
Green Bubble isn’t without cards either. QuestMobile’s “2026 Short Drama Industry Insight Report” shows that short‑drama mini‑programs within the WeChat ecosystem have reached 427 million monthly active users, surpassing the total of independent short‑drama apps at 335 million. However, the problem is that these 427 million users are spread across different mini‑programs, and no single mini‑program can compete head‑to‑head with Red Fruit.
Fragmented traffic can’t generate discourse power, which is why WeChat wants to step in and create an aggregated entry point.
WeChat short drama traffic is “ranked first in total volume but lacks aggregation” (source: QuestMobile “2026 Short Drama Industry Insight Report,” Hongguo data as of May 2026)
“Green Bubble is only the last link in the chain; merely adding another playback platform is not enough to challenge Hongguo,” said Zeng Xianru. He believes Green Bubble has at least two goals:
Externally, it can attract some short‑drama users from Hongguo. Internally, it can consolidate the fragmented short‑drama viewing behavior within the WeChat ecosystem into one place.
“Even if Green Bubble can’t successfully compete with Red Fruit, as long as it can get more WeChat users to watch dramas at a unified entry point, encourage more content creators to co‑publish, and increase daily usage time on WeChat, it is valuable,” said Zeng Xianru.
This is the long‑awaited variable for the industry. According to estimates from the DataEye Research Institute, the micro‑short drama market is expected to exceed ¥121 billion by 2026, with free micro‑short dramas accounting for about ¥57.3 billion. The market is large enough, but distribution has long been dominated by a single heavyweight player, Red Fruit, compressing the bargaining power of CPs to the extreme. Green Bubble offers a second‑pole possibility— even a limited‑time incentive with a 90% cash‑share condition is enough for producers to reconsider platform selection.
Short‑drama CP, and art‑creation founder Zhang Jinhui, has already registered with Green Bubble and is taking a wait‑and‑see approach, ready to give it a try. Her first impression was “the incentive policy is decent.”
Of course, the window period is limited. The Q4 incentive only covers October 16 to December 31, and the revenue‑sharing rules after the campaign ends are still unknown; WeChat’s commercialization pace has always been restrained, and whether it is willing to buy traffic at scale for Green Bubble remains to be seen. Green Bubble’s current shortcomings are also clear: the leaderboard still features many 2024 older dramas, there is insufficient supply of exclusive high‑quality new dramas, and the traffic‑driving pipeline is still being built.
Another variable is AI short videos.
Looking at the Green Bubble homepage leaderboard, AI short videos and comic‑style dramas dominate the top spots—largely a result of a supply‑side surge. However, WeChat’s incentive measures per‑capita watch time, and industry data generally shows that live‑action short dramas outperform AI content in retention and completion rates. The mismatch between the shelf structure and the content the platform truly wants is likely to be gradually corrected under the incentive stick.
The answer to the opening question might be—“Green Bubble won’t siphon traffic from Red Fruit’s Fruit, but it will take traffic from other short‑video mini‑programs within WeChat.”
For Tencent, achieving this goal doesn’t require beating Hongguo. WeChat already has over 400 million monthly active short‑video drama users; consolidating their fragmented viewing time and ad value into an official entry is already a sizable business in itself. For the industry, an additional distribution outlet of this scale means an extra bargaining chip.
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