Name: Why China’s 2-Minute Micro Dramas Are Poised To Take Over The U.S.
Uploaded: 2025-07-25T15:36:36.000Z
Duration: 9 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I only owe my success to that secret CEO of Kings Corp.

You will be groveling at my feet for forgiveness when you realize who I really am.

Spoiler alert, that man earning a meager wage does in fact turn out to be the secret CEO of Kings Corp.

This is one of the microdramas featured on Reelshort, a Chinese-backed short video app.

I'm willing to wager my entire reputation that this man is a useless loser.

All packed into snack-sized vertical video clips.

Fast, addictive, and ready to take over your feed.

In the States, you have soap opera, you know, Bowie and the Beautiful, and it's Bowie and the Beautiful on steroid, basically.

You've got to have a cliffhanger on every minute versus every hour.

So everything is sweet, short, and sharp.

They're tapping into the behavior of instant gratification.

The way that you immediately are satisfied by seeing this story is what is the hook.

It's a little over the top, but is it over the top that it's still entertaining, right?

China's microdrama market exceeded 50 billion yuan, or approximately 6.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2024, outpacing China's own box office.

And it now has its sights set on the U.S. market.

Many microdrama producers believe because America produced Hollywood and it's probably the world's largest cultural export.

If you can sell it to and make it appealing to the American public, you can then sell it and make it appealing to the rest of the world.

So what is behind the popularity of China's microdramas?

And can the nearly $7 billion industry become China's next big cultural export to disrupt the U.S. entertainment industry?

Microdramas started in China, I believe in around 2018, and they were sort of an offshoot and a way to capitalize on the trend and the popularity of short-form video, which was made popular by TikTok.

The format itself has become increasingly popular amongst users.

It's where their time was spent, which is why you saw Meta introduce Reels to Facebook and Instagram and why YouTube introduced Shorts to capitalize on this short-form video content.

In China, even though they have the IGN Tencent, they don't have Netflix.

They don't have a lot of the Western apps they don't have, so they have to create their own.

It all started with Douyin and also Kuaishou as they started pushing this vertical short dramas on their platforms.

Especially 2020, 2021, during the pandemic, dramas grew rapidly, low-cost production, fast-paced nature, about 90 seconds to 120 seconds long.

So whenever you have fragmented time, you watch.

It's not really about the quality, the cast, the story.

It's really about how effective you are to grab the audience within that second.

And that's what gets people engaged because it almost goes right into the crux of the story, wherever the drama is.

It doesn't require any effort on the part of the user to just jump in and start to watch.

These are like your telenovela, basically.

When you look at the genres, a lot of romantic comedy, they have the stories.

Unlike traditional big-budget TV series, microdramas offer producers a low-cost, high-reward format that's fast to make and easy to scale.

The streaming companies, a huge cost center for them is content creation.

For a short-form drama, you can get intriguing content at a much lower cost with a shorter production time, so you can have more volume.

The leading apps can churn 8 to 10 shows a month. You're looking at producing 100 original micro dramas per year.

They are usually taking unknown actors to play these parts.

You're looking at anything from top to finish within two months versus a year and a half.

China's microdrama market surpassed the film industry's annual box office revenue for the first time ever in 2024.

Part of microdrama's growth is also attributed to the marketing strategies geared towards their intended audience, typically women between the ages of 25 to 35.

They are able to produce it precisely, but also actually direct the marketing to the audience.

It's the precision in production and marketing, which I think is genius, actually.

Major players actually wanted to go beyond China.

Downloads of microdrama apps in the U.S. reached 10 million in April of 2025, an increase of 150% year-over-year, while monthly active users surged over 300% over the same period.

Real Short, Drama Box and Good Short were the top downloaded apps in the U.S. for microdramas.

They accounted for about 50% of the downloads in year-to-date 2025.

Real Short, Drama Box and Good Short were unavailable to accommodate CNBC's request to participate in the story.

The U.S. is the world's largest revenue-generating market for microdrama apps, contributing 60% of global mobile revenue in 2024.

In addition, the three short drama apps rank among the top 20 media and entertainment apps in the U.S. by mobile revenue so far this year.

So the U.S. is very important to microdrama apps because it is a higher ARPU, average revenue per user market, so that means that they can charge more per user.

The cost of the app when they monetize it is higher in the U.S.

With the popularity of microdramas steadily rising in the U.S., the question becomes whether the nascent format can make a dent in the U.S. entertainment industry and pose a challenge to existing players in the space.

In my view, microdramas do not pose direct threat to a at least not yet.

You watch a program on a streamer for the plot, the set, the acting, whereas this I think is just like a quick bit of entertainment.

But I wouldn't say that, oh, is it going to take away the movies?

I wouldn't say that, but I think definitely something to watch out for.

Microdramas are not aiming to become those big budget shows of films.

Instead, they are looking to carve out that unique space by targeting casual, short attention span viewers.

Microdramas pose more threat to social media companies because at this stage, they are competing for the eyeballs.

And I can either choose watching dog videos on TikTok or I can watch microdrama.

Some have compared the rise of microdramas to that of Quibi.

Short for quick bites featuring content under 10 minutes designed for viewing only on your phone.

A similar short form mobile streaming service that shut down in just six months after a launch in 2020.

We've had a lot more time and it was just really, really bad timing for them.

Hollywood styled content is something that they try to replicate, but in a very short kind of fast paced environment.

Vertical is popular, attention is becoming shorter.

But when it comes to execution, a lot of things went wrong for them.

Experts say it's more likely these short form dramas will coexist alongside other media and entertainment companies.

Would I be worried as a social media platform?

Yes, because somebody's taking away my eyeballs.

Would I be worried as Hollywood, Netflix and other platforms?

Yes, but not because they are the threat.

It's because the behavior and the market that they are creating is a threat.

You cannot compare street food to Michelin.

Is Michelin food going to take over street food?

But there is an appetite for street food.

There is an appetite for Michelin dishes.

So that's all I can sort of compare between microdrama and long form drama.

The rise of microdramas could force existing media companies to rethink their content strategies going forward.

Given the strength of the short form video format, I think that this will continue to grow.

Similar to the way short form video took off and it forced Meta and Google to add shorts and reels.

What I think will be very interesting is for the streamers to really pay more attention to the vertical audience and then perhaps to produce more to cater to them,

so that when they actually don't have time to watch five to six hours, then they can still engage the audience.

They also become more attractive partners to these other players to do partnership deals.

A lot of great IPs from the studios can be repurposed.