Tencent’s Lvpaopao short-drama service reaches 143 million users
Tencent’s WeChat-based Lvpaopao mini-program reportedly reached 143 million monthly active users in August, as promotion accelerates.
Tencent’s Lvpaopao short-drama mini-program reportedly reached 143 million monthly active users in August, giving the WeChat-based service a sizeable early audience in China’s fiercely competitive short-form video market. The figure comes from QuestMobile data reported by Jiemian and summarised by TechNode, rather than from Tencent’s own published user figures.12
The service recorded 89.68 million weekly active users in the first week of October, according to the same report. That was a 44.1% increase on the first week of September, suggesting that Tencent’s distribution advantage inside WeChat is helping Lvpaopao scale quickly.12
How Lvpaopao works
Lvpaopao is a WeChat mini-program offering free live-action short dramas, AI-generated dramas and animation. Advertising appears between episodes, giving Tencent a familiar mobile-video business model while lowering the barrier to entry for viewers. The service benefits from WeChat’s existing traffic and video ecosystem, so users do not need to install a separate standalone app to find its catalogue.1
TechNode also reported DataEye figures showing that Lvpaopao ran 43,000 advertising creatives between 1 and 7 October. Average daily placements rose 57% from the previous week as Tencent expanded promotion of the service.1 Those figures point to an aggressive push, although advertising volume is not the same thing as audience retention or revenue.
Why the numbers matter
Tencent is entering a market already shaped by ByteDance’s short-drama products and a large network of third-party producers and distributors. WeChat gives Lvpaopao an unusually broad route to potential viewers, but the service still has to turn reach into repeat viewing and a sustainable advertising business. The reported data also covers specific measurement periods, so it should not be treated as a current official monthly-user total.
Our opinion
Lvpaopao’s most interesting advantage is not that it has discovered a new format; it is that Tencent can put that format in front of an enormous existing WeChat audience. If the reported growth holds, the mini-program could become a serious distribution layer for short drama without needing to beat every rival on standalone-app downloads. The harder test will be whether Tencent can keep viewers coming back once the initial novelty fades, while maintaining enough quality to make a catalogue built from live-action, animation and AI-generated material feel coherent. For now, the numbers look like a strong launch signal, not proof that Tencent has won the category.