check Live heat index

It’s amazing how many people on Weibo want this show to fail. They are so irrational that they can’t even follow the math. This show is averaging 8200 on Weibo’s Heat Index since Monday. The show in 2nd place is averaging 2400. If you like stats that’s an astonishing range. In no way, is this shows numbers going sideways or plummeting yet. In fact.p, FoF’s average implies that this weekend’s heat index should rise past 8200. That’s when we’ll see if it stalls. It’s facing off against The Story of Pearl Girl which - on paper - should be beat it because it stars one of Weibo’s most talked about actresses. I’m amped for the weekend,

FoF deserves to be above 9. It’s clear there’s industry bias against the cast and the directo. I dont know what’s driving that… 

In any case, I hope that the public keeps defying the pundits. SOPG has 0 reasons to debut under 7900. As for FoF,  I’m ecstatic that it got to 8400. That’s higher than 75% of the iQiyi’s other content released this year. 

 L_H:

When the heat index rise so fast after debut, I thought they would gain enough popularity to reach 10,000 in no time. I didnt know it received so much hate in china

ya. same happened with KMLM. it rose to 9000 so fast then stuck below 9000. 

I don’t think it’s received a lot hate in China. It just hasn’t been marketed strongly in China. Its viewership is being driven word of mouth which is why this drama may have a shot at 10K. Kill Me, Love Me was a very highly marketed show. It came off the FL’s success in The Double in the Chinese market so it seemed destined to be another hit then it fizzled and flamed out.

FoF is exactly the opposite. It had minimal marketing. IQIYI even dropped it with very little fanfare. It still has lots of momentum with the public if you look at Douyin’s Top 30. The real questions for me are:
What will the weekend viewership be like? Will people binge watch it now that they have more free time?
What type of competition will The Story of Pearl Girl be? It’s being hyoed the way that an evangelist hypes the Bible so it should be strong competition.
Will iQIYI drop more than 1 episode a day over the weekend? Most of us in MDL have VIP subscriptions or rogue access to the shows so we’re in episode 11 but, officially, the mainland is still on Episode 5. That’s a big gap.

It broke 8500 a few hours ago so it still has momentum.

Good question. I’m going to cite MDL’s analysis to help answer it. As per this page, which was last updated this year, the iQIYI heat index:

“Heat Index measures the investment and popularity of a drama. It takes into account the video views, search, and engagement for a drama. The way it is calculated is not really clear and is proper for the company. So, we can't compare it with other companies' heat index.

Signification of iQiyi heat index (from my interpretation) :

A drama has some popularity when the index reaches 5 500/6 000 (5 500 for dramas that aired all the episodes the same day)
A drama that reaches 9 000 is well known and really popular.
A drama that reached 10k can be considered a super popular and successful drama (top drama from the platform).
10k is not the limit and the score can be higher.
The comparison between dramas of the same company is not significant too. Depending on the actors, the IP's popularity, the drama's budget, etc..., the score's meaning is totally different. For a high-budget drama with popular actors and ip, reaching 7 500 is average. However, for a low budget with no so well-known actors and not-so-popular ip, reaching 7 500 shows that the drama is a success.“

https://it.mydramalist.com/list/4q6a5k81

Although this show is already a success, 8500 means that we are getting closer to that evasive 9000 mark.

It’s now after 10:30pm in China which means we’ve gone beyond peak viewing times. At this point, it looks like FoF will be 4th. As expected the big marketing budgets of Pearl Girl and

It’s after 10pm in China which means we’re past peak viewership hours. The Fri-Sun frame has been interesting. Although, Pearl Girl and Love Game in Eastern Fantasy opened big, their numbers didn’t really improve much day-over-day. Eastern Fantasy started in the low 27Ks and hasn’t be able to break 29K on Tencent’s index. While Pearl Girl stated in the 10K range of Youku’s index, and it remains in that range.

Index scores aren’t based solely on viewership, rather they include SM posts and videos. The slow rise indicates that the majority of their scores were related to their marketing posts and videos and not viewership.

In contrast, FoF improved its score by 53% (going from 5500 to 8400) in its first 3 days.

FoF, for reason, also continued to defy expectations by improving its heat score this weekend: going from 8500 to 8700. That’s incredible given how much competition it faced.

However, I don’t expect to see many articles highlighting that the other two aren’t improving significantly and that FoF has managed to increase its score. The other two have more money to loose and are, understandably, still using this strategy:
Step 1: convince the people that what they have isn’t worth keeping. And convince the people who might want what those people have that it isn’t worth getting.
Step 2: offer your product directly after discrediting the other company’s product
Step 3: ensure that your product is more prominent than your competitions
Step 4: enlist outside help to praise your product more than your competitor’s
Step 5: double down on step 1 by ensuring that negative commentary about your competition is more prominent than positive commentary
Step 6: repeat steps 1-5

Seems unlikely since it’s an S+ drama production. Maybe, they ran out of initial Cash due to the underwater filming scenes. Ive heard those can be very expensive. But, they definitely slammed Weibo. One thing that I’ve noticed about promos for Pearl Girl is the posts contain comments from bots. Comments like “I can’t wait to see the show. I earned $100k last year. Click in this link to see how you can too.”

https://weibo.com/2342610415/5095931245237023