DigiTimes复盘AI token用途之争：中文在线称55%用于短剧/视频生成遭豆包否认，文章同时指AI短剧90%厂商亏损

More than half of China's AI token usage is reportedly concentrated in short dramas and video generation, but ByteDance's Doubao has disputed the figure, saying video-generation models account for only about 10% of overall computing resources. The conflicting estimates highlight the difficulty of assessing AI compute consumption and its commercial value.

According to reports from Hankyung and Chinese media outlet Caixin , Chinese digital publishing company Chinese Online disclosed at an investor briefing that 55% of China's AI token usage comes from short dramas and video generation. Marketing, including e-commerce and advertising, accounted for 24%, while software development, including coding, represented just 15%.
Notably, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) also cited the same figures in a report.
After the statistics surfaced, online commentators responded with self-deprecating criticism, claiming that the US uses 58% of its tokens for coding and business automation, while China spends half of its computing resources on entertainment.
Doubao, ByteDance's AI service, directly rejected the comparison in an official Weibo post, emphasizing that training and inference for video-generation models account for only about 10% of overall computing resources.
Two yardsticks, two answers
The discrepancy stems from different measurement standards. Chinese Online measured processed tokens, which are primarily reflected in output, while ByteDance cited the proportion of total computing-resource allocation.
In addition, Chinese Online's figures were estimated from internal data supplied by a single AI short-drama operator for the first quarter of 2026, combined with some external data. Critics therefore question whether they can be regarded as authoritative statistics for China as a whole.
Analysts have also pointed out that AI model pretraining consumes enormous computing power but generates little visible output in the form of tokens. Token share alone therefore cannot determine how overall computing resources are being used.
Video's heavy token appetite
There is little disagreement, however, that short-video production consumes astronomical quantities of tokens and computing power. Generating a five-second, 1080p silent video requires about 80,000 tokens per second, and creators often need to generate the footage repeatedly to improve the final result.
According to data from Tencent's Token Hub cited by Hankyung , that figure applies to Kuaishou's Kling Video V3, while generating a single image requires about 20,000 tokens.
Doubao's own usage has also continued to expand. ByteDance's Volcengine said daily token usage for Doubao models reached 180 trillion in June, more than 10 times the level of a year earlier.
Explosive growth, few winners
China's AI short-drama market is also experiencing explosive growth. Yet the high training and inference costs of advanced video models have brought the structural challenge of recovering costs and achieving profitability to the forefront.
Data from Yicai and data company DataEye showed that about 221,900 AI and animation short dramas were newly launched on Douyin in the first half of 2026. Only 1,055 of them, or 0.48%, accumulated more than 100 million views.
About 80% of the productions received fewer than 1 million views, while fewer than 1.3% surpassed the 50 million views considered the break-even point.
Although AI has reduced filming and editing costs, the savings have largely shifted to traffic-purchasing and marketing expenses. Marketing accounts for 80% to 90% of revenue; about 90% of producers are operating at a loss, and companies have begun laying off staff and exiting the market.