A September 6 report from CCTV Finance laid out the numbers: pricing for AI-generated short dramas has dropped from 5,000 yuan per minute to a few hundred yuan, edging close to the cost floor. Custom short-drama work, by contrast, still goes for 10,000 to 20,000 yuan a minute. Two price tiers in the same category, twenty to thirty times apart.
The report traces the gap to the supply side: the technical bar has dropped, producers have flooded in, and capacity has grown faster than demand. Once "being able to make one" stops being a scarce skill, pricing has nowhere to go but toward cost.
The market itself keeps growing. Per the report, China's AI drama and comic-drama market is expected to exceed 40 billion yuan in 2026, up 138% year over year, with overseas output accounting for nearly 70% of the overall overseas micro-short-drama market. Expanding scale and collapsing unit prices are happening in the same year.
The slide started two years ago
This isn't a one-month plunge. A December 2025 trade piece from The Paper (澎湃新聞) put the per-minute cost of AI comic dramas at 200 to 300 yuan — down from 1,000 to 2,500 yuan for the same category just nine months earlier, in March 2025. An earlier Yicai (第一財經) report noted that AI short-drama production costs were running around 15,000 yuan per minute in early 2024.
These figures come from different sub-segments — comic dramas and live-action AI short dramas run on separate production lines with different cost structures, so they shouldn't be stitched into a single continuous curve. But they point the same direction: each step up in generative-model capability eats another slice of work that used to require human labor, and pricing drops a rung in response.
The Yicai piece also included two numbers that better capture the situation on the ground: platform-side ad-spend ROI sits between 1.05 and 1.2, and only about 20% of the dramas produced by top companies turn a profit. Pay is retreating too — roles that used to pay 30,000 to 50,000 yuan a month have been pushed below 30,000.
What the math looks like at a few hundred yuan a minute
Take a typical spec: micro-short dramas usually run 80 to 100 episodes, one to two minutes each, for a finished runtime of about 120 minutes. At the low-end rate of 300 yuan a minute, production spend on a single drama comes to roughly 36,000 yuan; at the old 5,000-yuan rate, the same drama would cost around 600,000 yuan.
A shift of this size rewrites the ad-buying math. With production costs pushed down to the tens of thousands of yuan, a drama only needs to clear a 1.05 ROI on ad spend to avoid losing money, which leaves more room to run trials. But the same math holds for everyone, so as more titles pour in, ad-buying costs rise on their own. How much of the saved production budget actually stays with the production company depends on pricing on the traffic side — and that data isn't disclosed in the public reporting.
The CCTV Finance report doesn't say how many suppliers were sampled to arrive at the "a few hundred yuan" figure, nor does it give a statistical range, so it's better read as a directional signal for the industry than a citable average price.
The competition has shifted to a different axis
The report's conclusion centers on a shift in how companies compete: from racing on volume and price to competing on content and market reach. That shift is already visible on the production side — the custom-drama tier still holding at 10,000 to 20,000 yuan a minute is selling guaranteed delivery standards and channel access, not raw capacity.
How much further the low-price tier can fall is a question no public cost breakdown currently answers. The Paper's late-2025 piece said the price was "still heading down"; nine months on, CCTV is pointing in the same direction.
Sources: CCTV Finance, The Paper, CocoLoop, Yicai; CCTV Finance verified the per-minute pricing range and custom-production pricing, while The Paper and Yicai verified the AI comic-drama per-minute cost range, platform ad-spend ROI, and the share of profitable dramas.