China's platform war over AI video tools has created a paying profession almost overnight, according to a report by Entertainment Capital Review republished by 36Kr on September 30. The outlet spoke to four people working in the field and describes AI video makers who now earn more from short clips than many staff jobs in film or advertising pay, with the best-known accounts quoting six-figure yuan fees for a single sponsored post.
The figures in the report run from modest to striking. A junior-college student is said to clear more than 10,000 yuan a month from AI videos. An advertising worker who moved into AI production reports that his monthly income rose more than tenfold. At the top end, an account called Old Dream Gramophone, which posts emotionally driven AI clips to about 1.11 million followers, reportedly quotes 400,000 yuan for one brand deal, and has already worked with carmakers, appliance brands and food companies.
The report traces the boom back to Zombie Scavenger, a domestic AI production that became a hit in May last year and was nicknamed China's answer to Love, Death & Robots. Since then user-made AI video has grown fast. Douyin's AI Creator Contest, which had just ended, drew around 170,000 entrants over 72 days and produced more than 500 videos with over 10 million views each; related topics passed 100 billion views in total. Its gold-award film, Closure, took a 1 million yuan cash prize, and several drama-style entries, among them Not a Demon and Bone Reading, received 200,000 yuan apiece.
The report says the whole sector sees roughly a four-month window to cash in. As audiences pile in, the number of creators is climbing quickly, multi-channel networks and one-person companies are building matrices of accounts, and several leading creators said they have been working from morning to night without a day off since they began posting. The piece contrasts this with film schools still teaching traditional directing and editing theory, and film companies still in the middle of changing strategy, while these self-taught creators already have orders and income.
Behind the payouts is a fight between the companies that sell AI video "agents", the canvas-style tools that string models together. Because most of them call the same underlying models through APIs, the report argues, they can no longer stand out on technology alone, and the second half of the contest is about who can attract creators whose hits will show off the product. Platforms are offering cash, free computing credit, traffic, exposure and signing deals to win them.
Free computing power may be the most valuable of those perks. The report cites Chunye, a student behind the AI thriller series Crossing the Remains, who lives on 1,500 yuan a month and at first paid for generation himself. A usable minute of footage can take five or more attempts, burning about 10,000 points, or roughly 1,200 yuan, so one video could cost close to 10,000 yuan. He says he cut back to one meal a day and borrowed from classmates to keep going. After an introduction from the influencer AI Chatty, SenseTime's Seko signed him and gave him unlimited credit, bringing his production cost to zero.
Cash incentives have escalated through September. On the 21st, Jimeng AI and Skylark AI both upgraded their creator schemes, paying up to 60,000 yuan for a work that reaches 20 million views or a million likes, plus a 10,000 yuan bonus for works made on their canvas. Two days later LibTV halved its like threshold for rewards from 200,000 to 100,000, raised its top prize from 60,000 to 100,000 yuan and added a 72-hour bonus. AI Chatty, a Douyin reviewer of AI content who also runs a creator alliance called Interframe Creation, describes the moment as an arms race in which creators are the ones profiting, and says no platform can easily be the first to stop, even though nobody can say how many new users each round of spending brings in.
The report sets out three layers of income. The first and most common is platform incentives plus view revenue from short-video apps. The second, once an account has steady traffic, is commercial work, which splits into two kinds: selling ad space around an account's fans, and producing branded content with the creator's own skills. Pricing here has already caught up with conventional top accounts; the character Fang Taozi from the AI short drama The Laid-off Girl reportedly commands 258,000 yuan for a spot of just over a minute, which the report reads as a sign that an AI character can live on as its own IP. The third layer is contracting, in which creators take on complete productions for clients: ad films, game trailers, plot shorts.
Contract rates give a sense of the market. Chunye now charges 10,000 to 20,000 yuan per piece, mostly on work routed through AI Chatty, whose own sponsored posts start at about 50,000 yuan. A former ad-industry creator known as Can Visual, maker of the hit Life Do-over Game, quotes 5,000 to 30,000 yuan per finished minute, depending on how many characters and scene changes a brief needs, and more again if a product has to be trained into the model. He spends thousands of yuan a month on tokens, sometimes tens of thousands, but says model costs only shape the low and middle of the market; at the top, what matters is reliable traffic and the time spent on revisions and client communication.
The report is clear that only a few get this far. AI Chatty estimates that out of 100 creators trying to make money, about 10 win regular commercial orders and only one or two get well-paid contract work consistently. Several creators also told the outlet they are turning down offers from long-video platforms to make longer AI series on revenue-share terms, because short clips already come with free computing, pay out on views and build a following, whereas long-form work means long production cycles and uncertain returns.
As for who these creators are, the report finds a wide mix: film professionals changing course, film, animation and digital-media students teaching themselves, and people arriving from advertising, games and fine art. Some have no video background at all. One example is the account Yiershan Temple, whose AI light comedy about a top assassin looking after a girl has passed a million likes; its maker spent a decade in the music industry as an electronic producer and DJ, and was once ranked among China's top 100 DJs, before turning to AI video.
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