01. A surge of 25 billion in 6 days
A variety show that was originally not optimistic, relied on its high emotional concentration to directly attract capital and audiences.
From November 2 to November 9, when the market was in shock and adjustment, Mango Super Media, a subsidiary of Hunan Radio and Television, abruptly broke out of an independent market that had risen for 6 days in a row, with a cumulative increase of 60.54%. The company’s total market value increased by about 25 billion yuan. During the same period, Shenwan Media’s cumulative increase was only 12.54%.
The emotional trigger of this market wave is Li Na, a name that appears at the same time as traffic carnival and transaction hustle and bustle.
Who is Li Na? She was a popular contestant on “Super Girl” in 2006. She was in the same dormitory with Xu Fei, who was also a contestant, and was called “Feixue CP”. Later, Li Na’s “secret” plan to take orders privately and terminate the contract was leaked, and her career was suspended for a long time. Xu Fei has always denied the speculation about “whistleblowing”.
This “Leaking Rashomon” case, which had no concrete results and both sides held different opinions, created a gap between the two. Recently, in Mango TV’s self-produced friendship variety show “The Friendship Period”, the two of them had a face-to-face interview as guests for the first time in 15 years.
“I have been waiting for this moment for 15 years, Li Na.” “I am the one who is sentenced. Wherever I go, I will draw the ground as a prison, Li Na.” During the conversation, Xu Fei spoke sincerely and repeatedly called “Li Na”, using these two words as punctuation. As the program sliced up the screen, netizens followed suit. Whether they were complaining about work, sharing life, or making fun of themselves, it seemed that as long as “Li Na” was put at the end of the sentence, it would immediately add a sense of sadness, blank space, and solemn absurdity.
In fact, whether it is Li Na or “Li Na Body”, their emergence from the circle is an accident. “This itself is one of the several tipping points that “The Friendship Period” planted in the variety show, but the others did not explode.” Industry analyst Zhang Shule told Caijingtianxia.
The important thing is that through this show, Mango once again proved its ability to industrialize variety shows. This is the scarcity narrative in the eyes of capital.
Nowadays, there are many variety shows that observe love and marriage. On the one hand, the emotional threshold of the audience has been repeatedly raised; on the other hand, the accompanying anxiety about marriage and gender issues have emerged one after another. But friendship variety shows are an unexplored wasteland. There is no contract binding here, and the dissolution of a relationship often does not even have a formal ending. Because of this, friendship themes are seen as an emotional outlet with the same high concentration but low social pressure.
Mango became the first person to eat crab. At first, “Goodbye Lover” aroused heated discussions, and many netizens joked that they “want to watch “Goodbye Friends” to reunite friends who had broken up in the entertainment industry. Mango Super Media keenly captured this potential emotional gap and created such a program.
In the eyes of capital, this means that Mango Super Media has verified a set of emotional variety show methodology that can be extended and replicated. This is one of the reasons why Mango Super Media is sought after by funds.
Another layer of logic comes from cost considerations. Thinking back to when the “Post-Friends Period” was officially announced, there were mostly ridiculing voices. None of the former friends from the entertainment industry who were the most popular among netizens, including Jing Boran Fu Xinbo, Angela Chang, Weiqi Fan, and Wang Sulong and Zhang Bichen, were not invited. Unexpectedly, the show relied on real emotional tension and “Li Na’s body” played in slices to break out of the circle.
Yunhe data shows that on October 22, the first day after the launch of “Later Friendship Period”, the effective playback market share of the feature film was 34.9%; on October 29, the day “Li Na Ti” was fermented, the market share rose sharply to 74.3%, and further climbed to 77.1% on October 30. The show has thus become the first new variety show in 2026 with a market share exceeding 70%.
On November 2, Mango Super Media’s stock price hit the daily limit of “20cm”, and then rose for 6 consecutive days.
In the eyes of capital, the message behind the data is that Mango does not rely on popular artists, but can create hot spots by capturing the emotions of adults. Related topics can also be re-created and further spread. This is a low-cost content path.
“Mango is equivalent to a demonstration that it can not only reduce costs and increase efficiency, but also provide innovative content.” Wang Zhaojiang, director of the Beishan Changcheng Fund Investment Research Institute, told Caijingtianxia that the surge in Mango Super Media’s stock price this time is essentially a capital reward for innovation, which is the same logic as the original capital excavation of technology segmentation tracks.
02. Mango Super Media’s “emotional business”
Mango Super Media’s dominance in the field of variety shows is undoubted. Looking back at Mango TV’s variety show landscape in recent years, it has never stopped selling hits. The rise and fall of its phenomenal IP directly affects the nerves of the capital market.
The most impressive thing is the first season of “Sister Riding the Wind and Waves” broadcast by Mango Super Media in 2020. The total number of advertisers exceeded 40, breaking many investment records. In June of that year, Mango Super Media’s stock price rose sharply, and its market value exceeded 100 billion yuan for the first time. In January 2021, Mango Super Media’s share price hit a historical high of 88.76 yuan (pre-rights restoration price), and its market value exceeded 165 billion yuan. However, the market value of 100 billion only lasted for more than a year. Since then, the stock price has been declining. The peak created by the first generation of “Lang Jie” became a peak moment that could not be reached for many years.
▲Mango Super Media’s stock price trend in the past eight years
On May 20, 2022, in the third season of “Sisters Riding the Wind and Waves”, Cyndi Wang unexpectedly left the show while singing and dancing “Love You” on stage. “Cyndi Wang Boy” announced that he would buy stocks to support him. Related topics became hot searches, and Mango Super Media’s stock price rose slightly. But this round of “Cyndi Wang Concept” did not last long. After the stock price rose slightly, it turned into a continuous downward trend on May 27. The reason is that the third season of the program did not realize the investment simultaneously, and the number of advertisers dropped from more than 40 in the first season to 15 in the second season to about 6.
2024 and 2026 are called the “big years” of Mango Super Media’s variety shows by the market.
In 2024, Mango TV launched 160 variety shows, ranking first in the industry in effective broadcast volume. Yunhe data shows that among the top 10 effective broadcasts of online variety shows in the country, Mango Super Media has five exclusive seats, including “Goodbye Lover Season 4”, “Chengfeng 2024”, “Detective Season 9”, “Flowers and Boys·Silk Road Season” and “Beyond the Troubles Season 4”.
At the beginning of the broadcast of “Goodbye Darlings Season 4”, the popularity was originally focused on Yang Zi and Huang Shengyi. After the second week, the topic quickly turned to Mai Lin. With her extremely controversial performance, she triggered a phenomenon-level discussion and flooded the Internet. The Internet even spawned a “Maixue” that specializes in studying the psychology of her words and actions. However, there are only three brands embedded in this season’s variety show, including China Duty Free Rishang, Xiu Xiu Pharmaceutical, and Ripe Fruit Sugar-Free Tea. Director Liu Le once said: “Most brands think the connotation is not good and it is relatively difficult to attract investment.”
This year, with the broadcast of a large number of variety shows, Mango Super Media’s membership revenue exceeded 5 billion yuan for the first time. The financial report shows that by the end of 2024, the number of Mango TV members will reach 73.31 million, and the annual membership revenue will reach 5.148 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 19.3%.
In 2026, Mango Super Media will become more and more courageous in the variety show track. At the beginning of November, “Mango has launched six variety shows this year” became a hot search topic, and was called Mango TV’s “variety show year” by netizens. This “six consecutive hits” lineup covers “Wife’s Romantic Travel 2026”, “Chengfeng 2026”, “Chinese Restaurant Season 10”, “My Girl 2026”, “Flowers and Boys 2026” and “Later Friendship Period”. Among them, 5 are “N-generation variety”, which are continuations of existing IPs. The only original program is “The Friendship Period”.
If you look at Mango TV’s hot hits in recent years by year, there is no shortage of them in terms of quantity. Looking at it separately, what supports this “respectability” is the stable output of “comprehensive N generations” rather than the continuous production of new IPs.
However, variety shows also face huge challenges.
Chen Jingjing, founder of Jingjie Brand Consulting, told Caijingtianxia that according to Huan.com big data statistics, in the first half of 2026, more than 50% of the top new variety shows will not have a named brand, and the proportion of “Variety N Generation” without a named brand will also reach 30%. As the spread of hot topics becomes increasingly fragmented, brands are taking advantage of the trend faster, with more participants, and homogeneous content continues to dilute consumers’ attention. The instantaneous explosive power of top hot spots is still very strong, but the marginal benefits of ordinary brands following the trend may be declining. Hot spots can bring short-term traffic, but they are difficult to replace long-term brand building.
In addition to variety shows, Mango Super Media has also found a new growth narrative-AI. Not long ago, the AI drama “Journey to the West” was launched on Hunan Satellite TV and Mango TV for one week, and Mango Super Media’s stock price surged by about 50%. On August 31 and September 1, Mango Super Media hit the daily limit of “20CM” for two consecutive trading days. An AI drama series increased the market value by 11.6 billion yuan in two days. However, the reputation of the audience is in sharp contrast with the enthusiasm of the capital side – the evaluation is polarized.
The market prices innovation, but ultimately it comes back to performance itself.
Looking at the financial performance of Mango Super Media, in 2020, Mango Super Media’s revenue exceeded 14 billion yuan for the first time. However, in the following five years, its revenue scale has been hovering around 14 billion yuan, and its net profit has slipped from a peak of 3.5 billion yuan in 2023 to 1.227 billion yuan in 2025.
In the first three quarters of 2026, Mango Super Media’s operating income was 9.351 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3.18%; net profit was 213 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 79.01%, and the profit scale hit the lowest level in the past five years. Breaking the data down into a single quarter, the fluctuations are even more eye-catching. Revenue has been stable at more than 3 billion yuan in the three quarters of this year, but net profit has been like a roller coaster: there was still about 200 million yuan in the first quarter, it fell directly to 2.32 million yuan in the second quarter, and it barely returned to 11.55 million yuan in the third quarter.
Why is there a contrast between capital markets and performance? Zhang Shule told Caijingtianxia that the popularity of such variety shows is more about the spread of entertainment gossip, which is easy to make headlines and trending searches. However, the fission of short video slices on social platforms allows audiences to obtain information without following the original videos. Therefore, the increase in users brought to Mango TV is not as much as expected. At the same time, popular variety shows can certainly bring in incremental members and increase advertising quotations and placements, but compared with the huge overall operating costs, this incremental revenue is still limited.
Mango does have the ability to create hit items, but its profits no longer respond meaningfully to “hit items”. The core issue that the capital market cares about most is how much of the created attention will eventually be absorbed into the net profit of the financial report after investment negotiations, membership conversion, and cost amortization.
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