In a new industry report released this Wednesday at a national online audiovisual conference held in Chengdu, the capital of southwest China’s Sichuan province, the China Netcasting Services Association announced a major milestone for the country’s digital content sector: as of December 2025, the total number of online audiovisual users in China hit 1.099 billion, making it the most widely used internet service by user base in the country.
The report confirms that the online audiovisual industry has maintained its position as China’s dominant digital service, demonstrating extraordinary resilience and enduring mass appeal even as competition across the country’s digital landscape continues to intensify. Beyond the user growth milestone, the report outlines robust expansion across multiple core industry metrics. In 2025, the total market size of China’s online audiovisual sector grew 5.3 percent year-over-year to reach nearly 1.29 trillion yuan, equivalent to approximately 188 billion U.S. dollars. The number of registered enterprises operating in the space has also surpassed 800,000, with micro-sized businesses accounting for 87.8 percent of all market participants, signaling a dynamic, accessible market for new and small-scale creators and operators.
Among all online audiovisual formats, short-form video has emerged as the primary engine of the sector’s ongoing growth. It is the only major category of internet application in China that recorded simultaneous increases in total user count and daily usage rate in 2025. Notably, short video platforms have also become the main on-ramp for first-time internet users in China, with 44.6 percent of new internet users accessing the web for the first time via short video applications.
User engagement with online audiovisual content also reached new heights last year. The report found that the average daily time spent by users viewing online audiovisual content hit 201 minutes per person. One of the fastest-growing segments is micro-dramas, short-form serialized content that has exploded in popularity, jumping in usage to rank as the second most popular audiovisual format nationwide, outpacing traditional long-form video and trailing only short-form clips.
The report also highlighted the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on the sector, which is reshaping content creation and consumption patterns. In 2025, more than 2 billion AI-generated audio and video clips were produced in China, representing a 14-fold year-over-year increase. Surveys included in the report found that more than half of all online audiovisual users regularly consume AI-generated short video content.
Zhou Jie, deputy secretary-general of the China Netcasting Services Association, noted that the integration of generative artificial intelligence into digital content creation has become a core growth driver for the industry. This technological fusion is unlocking untapped creative capacity and fundamentally reshaping how audiences interact with online content, he added.