The rise of silver-haired short plays: opening up a new blue ocean in the short play market?
“The 40- or 50-year-old heroine is disliked at home by her son, who even wants her mother to remarry in exchange for an 88,000 yuan bride price. At this point, a rich man posing as a chauffeur appears and starts a romantic 'twilight romance' with the heroine.” In recent months, middle-aged and elderly-themed short dramas have frequently topped the charts. Still familiar with the plot, familiar routines, only to change the age, the wind of the short drama rolled to the “silver hair track”.
The potential of the silver market：
Data from the official website of the Ministry of Civil Affairs shows that by the end of 2023, there will be 296.97 million elderly people aged 60 and above, accounting for 21.1% of the total population. In the era of universal short videos, facing such a large group, there should be short video content that meets their needs. Short dramas initially focus on attracting young viewers, but although the elderly population comes into contact with the Internet later and has a slower reaction speed, this does not mean that they do not have a need for cultural entertainment. As China's aging population continues to grow, this need becomes more apparent. The amazing data of short dramas also reflects the enthusiasm of the elderly group for short dramas, proving the huge potential of the “silver hair economy” market.
ERRC model analysis:
At present, the types of short dramas covering the middle-aged and elderly groups are becoming increasingly diversified, including sweet favor dramas, love dramas, family emotion dramas and adversity dramas, etc. Against this background, short dramas have become a popular genre among the middle-aged and elderly groups. In this context, short dramas have become a new way of emotional communication and socialization for the aging group, becoming a medium for them to express their emotions and find social topics for their peers. For middle-aged and old-aged viewers, high-value content should be strengthened, such as increasing the emotional depth and complexity of character relationships in dramas to meet their needs for deep emotional communication.
Compared with young users, middle-aged and old-aged viewers have their unique needs, such as health, old age and other topics closely related to the lives of middle-aged and old-aged people. At present, some of the short dramas are still relatively rough in content production, and there is no obvious difference from the scripts for young people, which are still familiar plots and pushing development through reversal. Silver-haired short dramas should incorporate more elements that are more relevant to the lives of the elderly and create high-quality short dramas. At the same time, for older people who are new to the Internet and have a weaker ability to differentiate, further regulation and guidance is needed to help them differentiate between “drama” and “reality”, so as to promote the benign development of the market.
Middle-aged and elderly theme of the fire, so that stay up late to catch up with the drama shipping is no longer the privilege of young people, retired silver-haired people who have the money and leisure to follow the trend of the times. But the healthy development of this market, or need to short drama producers and regulators together with the cooperation. This group has more leisure time and not to be underestimated spending power, content creators and platforms may wish to pay attention to their needs, and adjust the corresponding content output and supply strategy to open up a new market blue ocean.
From a macro perspective, the popularity of the Internet and the aging of the demographic structure have created the premise for the explosion of silver-haired short dramas. Short dramas, an emotionally stimulating and intensive form of content, can quickly capture the aesthetic and content consumption needs of the silver-haired group, and have an extremely strong commercial capacity. From the perspective of Blue Ocean Theory, silver-haired short dramas have opened up a new market, capturing the elderly as a consumer group, and creating targeted short drama content with a high conversion rate for the purpose of meeting their aesthetic and emotional needs. However, from the perspective of risk, the low production threshold of short dramas requires creators to quickly find a certain type of explosive scripts, and later entrants will compete to imitate, resulting in saturation of similar content, so entrants need to face very fierce competition. From a regulatory point of view, the relevant policies will continue to improve, some eye-catching and controversial content can no longer appear in the public eye. And the payment mechanism will become more open and transparent, to eliminate the harvesting traps, so the competition and challenges faced by practitioners should not be underestimated.
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