Chapter 1676 - 823: So Many People Watching

Chapter 1676: Chapter 823: So Many People Watching

Probably because Deep Sea went viral last year, this January almost every domestic online video platform launched a drama with dual female leads.

Chestnut Video rolled out Mature Ceremony Year with a lineup of Cheng Shenlv and Yu Yhan, telling a story about a veteran and a newbie teaming up to "level up" in the workplace.

Yuehai Network launched Death Prediction Letter, using a veteran combo of Fan Zhu and Lew Qingqing to tell the story of two neighbors getting caught up in the same suspense case.

The cast of Sanfan Video’s Annual meeting is noticeably weaker than the previous two, starring Yu Sitian and Jin Lin. In terms of name recognition and popularity, both are behind the first two pairs, and on top of that it’s a pure-romance plus female-growth story, the least commercially appealing.

The three dramas premiered almost simultaneously, and platforms, production teams, celebrity teams, and fans all kicked off a publicity and marketing war, lively and spectacular.

China’s market is too big; it’s never dominated by just one player.

What no one expected was that the quality of these three dramas turned out surprisingly high—none of them fell flat and got mocked, and even casual viewers were praising them.

This made all three companies especially overjoyed—anyone in this business knows one thing: for a show to be well-reviewed and earn a good reputation with the general public is something you can’t count on; you only encounter it if you’re lucky.

The three platforms all ramped up their promotional spending, vying for viewers.

In the public discourse, for a while, the three web dramas dazzled and competed, while the TV dramas aired by traditional TV stations all quietly backed off.

Sword Lady, produced by Song Chi’s Company, was moved up on the schedule by Hongcheng TV Station under these circumstances.

Sword Lady was also a simulcast between TV and web, but with TV first and web later.

Zhang Hongyu, as a veteran Movie Queen and TV queen, has exceptionally strong audience affinity.

Right around this time, Song Chi had also wrapped filming.

So Song Chi took Zhang Hongyu and Xu Zhuqi, the two leads, and started doing the promo circuit.

Sword Lady was a wuxia series produced by Song Chi’s Company.

Besides Zhang Hongyu and Xu Zhuqi, there were many newcomer actors.

The series aired in a TV–web simulcast on Hongcheng TV Station and Chestnut Video.

Song Chi brought the cast onto more than a dozen shows such as Life Visit, Three Meals a Day, What a Nice Weather for recordings, and even organized a grand premiere celebration, inviting all his friends in the industry to come and show support.

By this point, the drama market had basically already been split among the three platforms.

Hongcheng TV Station chose to launch at this time because the three web dramas had basically reached their mid-to-late run.

Sword Lady is a very long wuxia series, fifty minutes per episode, with a total of seventy-five episodes, airing one episode a day. When it bumps into variety-show scheduling on Saturdays and has to give up the slot, it will still take almost three months to finish airing.

The internal evaluation of this series was very high, so they wanted to seize the initiative.

Zhou Yun knew this series was important for Song Chi and his company, with a large investment behind it.

She couldn’t rush back to help in person, so she recorded a VCR, posted on Weibo, and launched a "chasing-episodes diary" project on her own social media platforms.

She set up a super-topic called "Sword Lady Chasing-Episodes Diary."

Zhou Yun’s fans were all stunned, leaving comments: You’ve never even promoted your own dramas this diligently.

Seeing the fans say this, Zhou Yun felt both amused and helpless. She really had never promoted her own dramas with this level of effort, but honestly, asking her to push a show she herself stars in this hard would make her feel awkward, too much like "the potter praising her own wares." But when it’s someone else’s drama, she doesn’t have that psychological burden.

On the day of Sword Lady’s premiere, Song Chi was uncharacteristically a little nervous.

He didn’t know how this series would perform. A wuxia drama has no way to do product placement; it can only make money off licensing. This series had an investment as high as 200 million Chinese Yuan. Compared with other big productions it might still be a bit inferior, not top-tier in terms of budget, but for Song Chi’s Company it was already an extremely large investment.

It was also a series tailor-made for Zhang Hongyu.

When the ratings finally came out, the first episode reached 0.945%, hitting expectations and making everyone breathe a sigh of relief.

This was effectively doubling Hongcheng TV Station’s rating from yesterday, which had only been 0.41%.

The audience’s first-episode feedback was also very good; everyone said they hadn’t seen such a finely produced, strongly "wuxia-flavored" wuxia drama in a long time.

At midnight, the first episode went online on Chestnut Video.

Within an hour of going live, the first episode’s viewership surpassed six million, and the album’s total play count broke eighty million.