Faced with the increasingly fierce market competition in short drama localization, many companies have opted for a "quick and intensive" strategy to grab market share. Launching a large number of new dramas in a short period, blindly chasing popular themes while neglecting the quality and innovation of the content itself.
Meanwhile, they cost massive capital investment in buying traffic, attempting to attract users' transient attention through this approach.
However, such a strategy often leaves overseas audiences inundated with homogeneous, low-quality content, resulting in a highly uniform and unappealing user experience. Eventually, the industry gets trapped in vicious price wars and user trust crises, making it difficult to build sustainable competitiveness. When all companies have access to similar traffic resources, what ultimately determines the differences in profitability?
In this era where traffic is deemed paramount, many companies mistakenly believe that "buying traffic equals grabbing the market", but this is far from the truth. High-priced traffic can bring short-term exposure, yet it fails to guarantee user retention and continuous payment.
Shoddy localization, such as awkward machine translation subtitles and low-quality dubbing, significantly increases user churn rate and drives up customer acquisition costs. What truly decides whether users are willing to stay, pay, and even subscribe long-term is the high-quality localization experience.
For instance, a company spent millions of dollars on traffic acquisition, but its first-day retention rate was merely 15% due to poor localization quality. Most users never made any payments, leading to the ultimate failure of the project.
On the contrary, high-quality localization is the key to improving user retention and payment conversion rates. Its core value is mainly reflected in three aspects below.
Firstly, it reduces long-term customer acquisition costs. High-quality localization wins user recognition, drives spontaneous sharing and word-of-mouth communication, thereby expanding brand influence and gradually reducing reliance on high-priced traffic.
Secondly, it boosts Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). A good user experience builds trust, making users more willing to pay for content, including subscribing to new dramas and unlocking episodes, which directly drives revenue growth.
Finally, it extends the Lifetime Value (LTV) of users. Satisfied users are more likely to consume continuously and become a long-term value source for the platform, rather than just "one-time traffic".
In contrast, relying on cheap localization solutions such as machine translation and AI dubbing may seem to control costs, but in reality, they bring irreversible negative impacts. Once users encounter shoddy subtitles and dubbing, they easily feel deceived, churn quickly, and are hard to win back—along with all their potential consumption.
This is precisely the core reason why many enterprises emphasize that "it's better to let one user have a good experience a thousand times than a thousand users have a bad experience once".
What's more serious is that a large amount of low-quality content triggers negative reviews, which further discourages potential users and forms a vicious cycle of brand image. Once a platform is labeled as "low-quality", even if it launches high-quality content later, it will be difficult to reverse users' inherent negative perceptions.
Therefore, in the business model of short dramas globalization, high-quality localization is the core link in realizing traffic monetization and the key to shifting from the "money-burning for traffic" strategy to the "quality-driven" one. In the future, the companies that can truly achieve profitability in the overseas market will undoubtedly be those that adhere to content quality and build a brand moat through professional localization.
Only by breaking away from the "red ocean" of low-level competition and opening up a new "blue ocean" by improving localization quality can enterprises truly establish sustainable core competitiveness in the global content competition.
