Jiangyou says China's AI comic-drama market is contracting
Huang Haonan says his team shrank from about 1,000 to 300 as surging output, oversupply and platform dynamics squeeze China's AI comic-drama market.
What happened
Event details
In a July 12, 2026 follow-up interview published by Crossing, Huang Haonan said China's AI comic-drama market had effectively lost its earlier growth model and that his team was down to about 300 people. He said that after Seedance 2.0, monthly output rose from one title made by more than a dozen people to three or four titles per person, while the cost per title fell from about RMB 150,000 to RMB 40,000–50,000. According to Huang, the simultaneous jump in efficiency and supply allowed platform traffic, paid-promotion costs and policy expectations to compress margins, pushing the business toward overseas distribution in the short term. His assessment describes his company and a leading practitioner's view; it does not mean the wider AI animation or video-generation sector has disappeared. A July 3 Xinhua report showed the company was still producing content and discussing overseas expansion, suggesting that “the industry is gone” refers to the collapse of the earlier boom and scaling model, not the end of operations.
Assessment
Why it matters
The seven-month swing from a roughly 1,000-person expansion plan to contraction offers a rare before-and-after view of how higher generation efficiency can create oversupply, deskill production and compress content-company margins through platform distribution.
Availability
Access notes
“The industry is gone” is the interviewee's assessment of the business model in China, not a statistical finding that the sector no longer exists.