WeChat's Green Bubble mini-program takes on ByteDance's Hongguo in free short dramas
In late September WeChat quietly launched the "Green Bubble Short Drama" mini-program, renamed in July 2026 from a mini-program Tencent registered in April 2025; in August testing it debuted the AI short drama "Yinghou Yaya," which WeChat says drew hundreds of millions of views in three days and peaked at 2 million concurrent viewers. It uses WeChat Channels-style playback, free-with-ads (IAA) monetization and "friends are watching" social distribution, taking on ByteDance's Hongguo, which QuestMobile put at 168 million DAU in July 2026, up 107% year on year; WeChat short-drama mini-programs had 427 million monthly actives in February 2026. The piece adds that China's micro-drama rules took effect on Sept 1, 2026, requiring classified filing, licences and labels on AI-generated content; Q1 2026 saw 128,000 micro-dramas launched industry-wide with over 95% AI-generated; and China Literature's short-drama and AI comic-drama revenue hit 430 million yuan in H1 2026, over triple a year earlier, though over half runs on Hongguo.
WeChat's move concentrates short-drama distribution into one official, socially driven, ad-funded outlet, making AI-generated micro-dramas and their compliance a bigger factor in platform competition.