iQIYI Revenue Crossed $1 Billion in a Quarter in Q1 2026

iQIYI reported in its Q1 2026 earnings (January through March 2026, results published May 2026) that total revenue reached RMB 7.8 billion (approximately $1.08 billion at the prevailing RMB/USD exchange rate), crossing $1 billion in US dollar equivalent for the first time in the company’s quarterly history and representing an 8 percent year-over-year increase from RMB 7.2 billion in Q1 2025, with membership services revenue — comprising paid iQIYI VIP subscriber fees — reaching RMB 5.1 billion ($708 million), representing 65 percent of total revenue, and online advertising revenue reaching RMB 2.0 billion ($278 million), representing 26 percent of total revenue, with the remainder from content distribution licensing. iQIYI’s Q1 2026 investor filings show paid subscribers reaching 108 million at the end of March 2026, up from approximately 99 million in Q1 2025, the first time in iQIYI’s history that paid subscriber count has exceeded 105 million in a first calendar quarter — historically the seasonally weakest subscription quarter of the year because Q1 includes the Chinese New Year holiday period during which free content distribution competes most directly with paid subscription upsell. iQIYI is the third-largest online video platform globally by paid subscriber count after Netflix (approximately 300 million) and YouTube Premium (approximately 120 million), and the largest paid video subscription platform originating from mainland China — a market of approximately 600 million active online video users where the paid video subscription model has been structurally more difficult to sustain than in US markets due to historical consumer pricing sensitivity and the availability of free-tier content libraries that include most titles that Western platforms would place exclusively behind paywalls. The $1 billion quarterly revenue milestone — achieved against a backdrop of Chinese macroeconomic slowdown that reduced discretionary consumer spending growth and compressed online advertising CPM rates — reflects iQIYI’s sustained investment in premium long-form drama content (particularly the costume drama and romance genres that drive paid subscriber conversion among the platform’s primary 18-to-35 female subscriber demographic), the growing adoption of the short drama format (短剧, episodes of 3 to 10 minutes viewed in rapid-consumption sessions) as a discovery and retention mechanism for the iQIYI platform, and the platform’s AI-generated content tools that have reduced per-episode production cost for short drama content by approximately 30 percent relative to conventionally produced equivalent-length episodes. iQIYI’s parent company Baidu holds approximately 35 percent of iQIYI’s outstanding shares, and the relationship provides iQIYI with access to Baidu’s Ernie Bot large language model infrastructure for AI content recommendation, AI subtitle translation, and AI-generated synopsis tools that reduce editorial team workload on iQIYI’s library of more than 200,000 hours of video content. Netflix’s $82.7 billion content acquisition from Warner Bros illustrates the opposite end of the content scale strategy from iQIYI’s domestic market focus: while Netflix is investing in acquiring a multi-decade library of Western film and television IP at a price that only its 300 million global subscriber base can justify amortising, iQIYI’s content investment of approximately RMB 10 to 12 billion ($1.4 to $1.7 billion) annually is concentrated entirely in Chinese-language content produced for the mainland China market — a deliberate domestic-market focus that has been reinforced by Chinese regulatory requirements that favour domestic content on domestic platforms and by the practical difficulty of distributing Chinese drama content to non-Chinese-speaking international audiences at the production values that compete with locally-produced content in international markets.

iQIYI’s profitability trajectory — the company first reported a quarterly operating profit in Q2 2023 and sustained quarterly operating profitability through 2024 and 2025 — represents the most significant structural achievement in the Chinese online video market since the three major platforms (iQIYI, Tencent Video, and Youku) all operated at persistent operating losses from 2016 through 2022 while competing on content investment and subscriber acquisition at a scale that their advertising revenue alone could not support. The path to profitability required three simultaneous operational adjustments: membership price increases that raised iQIYI VIP from RMB 25 per month in 2020 to RMB 30 per month in 2023, content cost rationalisation that reduced iQIYI’s annual content spending from approximately RMB 20 billion in 2021 to approximately RMB 12 billion in 2025 while improving quality concentration — the platform’s top 10 percent of titles by viewership generating approximately 65 percent of total viewing hours, making content investment efficiency in hit-driven production more valuable than library breadth; and the development of the interactive advertising format (iQIYI’s “Advanced Customised Content” or ACC) that integrates brand placements directly into drama production at a CPM premium of 180 to 240 percent above standard pre-roll advertising. The short drama market (短剧) has become a significant incremental revenue driver for iQIYI’s paid subscription business: iQIYI’s short drama platform — launched under the brand “Boiling Point” (沸点) in 2023 — had accumulated approximately 12,000 short drama titles by Q1 2026, with daily viewing time on short drama content exceeding 80 million minutes across paid and free-tier iQIYI users. Short drama consumption drives paid subscription conversion among users who initially access iQIYI’s platform for free short content and subsequently encounter a paywall on premium long-form drama episodes that their engagement with the platform has created interest in, a monetisation funnel that has contributed to iQIYI’s paid subscriber growth in the 18-to-25 demographic at a rate that long-form drama promotion alone did not achieve in prior years. IDC’s China digital media market analysis for 2026 projects the total paid streaming video subscription market in mainland China reaching RMB 120 billion ($16.6 billion) annually by 2028, growing at approximately 12 percent compound annual rate from RMB 85 billion in 2025, with iQIYI, Tencent Video, and Youku collectively capturing approximately 90 percent of the paid subscriber market and the remaining 10 percent distributed among ByteDance’s Xigua Video, Bilibili, and emerging short drama platforms. iQIYI’s position as the number-one paid streaming platform in China by mindshare in the costume drama and romance genres — the two highest-subscriber-retention content categories in the Chinese streaming market, consistently producing the platform’s highest completion rates (viewers finishing entire season runs) and lowest mid-season churn — is the content moat that justifies iQIYI’s RMB 12 billion annual content investment despite the market’s capacity for simultaneous subscription to multiple platforms. Disney’s streaming revenue crossing $6 billion quarterly in Q2 FY2026 illustrates the global streaming profitability story that iQIYI’s Q1 2026 results extend to the Chinese market context: both companies demonstrated in their respective 2023-to-2026 earnings trajectories that streaming profitability at scale requires the same operational discipline — content cost rationalisation, membership price improvement, advertising tier yield improvement — regardless of whether the content is Marvel franchise IP or Chinese costume drama, validating that the streaming profitability model is structurally reproducible across content markets that differ radically in IP type, production culture, and audience viewing behaviour. Crunchyroll reaching 15 million paid subscribers with genre-specialist anime streaming provides the contrasting model: where iQIYI competes within the mass-market Chinese streaming duopoly serving 600 million Chinese internet users through broad drama and variety programming, Crunchyroll serves a 15 million global paid subscriber base with anime-specialist programming that can sustain premium pricing and low churn through genre exclusivity — demonstrating that both mass-market domestic streaming and genre-specialist global streaming can achieve profitability through content investment concentrated in the specific categories their subscriber base demonstrates the highest willingness to pay for.

What iQIYI’s Short Drama Platform Reaching 12,000 Titles Signals About Chinese Streaming’s Format Innovation

iQIYI’s short drama (短剧) library reaching 12,000 titles by Q1 2026 — produced at approximately 10 to 30 episodes of 3 to 8 minutes each, consumed in single-session binges rather than the weekly-episode-release cadence of traditional long-form drama — represents a format innovation in streaming content structure that has no direct Western equivalent and that emerged from the specific conditions of Chinese mobile video consumption: the dominance of the smartphone as the primary content consumption device (approximately 87 percent of Chinese streaming viewing hours on mobile as of Q1 2026, versus approximately 45 percent for US streaming), the short-session viewing behaviour of commuters on high-speed rail and subway networks in tier-1 and tier-2 Chinese cities, and the algorithmic recommendation infrastructure of TikTok’s Chinese equivalent (Douyin) that trained the 18-to-35 demographic to expect content that delivers a complete narrative satisfaction within a 5 to 10 minute viewing window. The short drama format’s production economics are structurally different from long-form drama at both the cost and quality dimensions: a 30-episode short drama series can be produced for approximately RMB 3 to 8 million ($415,000 to $1.1 million), compared to a 40-episode long-form drama that costs approximately RMB 60 to 200 million ($8.3 to $27.8 million), with iQIYI’s AI production tools reducing per-episode visual effects cost by approximately 30 percent and script development time by approximately 40 percent through AI-assisted dialogue generation and scene composition optimisation. The AI content tools deployed across iQIYI’s short drama production pipeline — branded under the iQIYI AI Content Platform (iACP) — integrate with production companies that iQIYI co-produces content with and are not available to independent producers who license finished content to the platform, creating an AI production advantage that functions as a supplier relationship benefit for iQIYI’s co-production partners rather than a broadly available market tool, and therefore sustaining rather than commoditising the short drama content quality differentiation that iQIYI’s platform offers relative to independent short drama platforms that distribute user-generated productions without equivalent AI production support. iQIYI’s full-year 2026 revenue guidance of RMB 32 to 34 billion ($4.4 to $4.7 billion) — at the midpoint implying approximately 9 percent year-over-year growth from 2025 — requires continued paid subscriber growth, advertising CPM recovery as the Chinese digital advertising market stabilises from 2025’s macro-driven compression, and short drama membership revenue expansion as iQIYI introduces a short drama-exclusive paid subscription tier that prices the short drama library separately from the main iQIYI VIP tier to capture incremental revenue from users who want short drama access without the full long-form drama subscription commitment.