I’ll skip the formalities and the statistics of how successful micro-drama is and what it actually is because if you’ve landed here you probably already know it, and I don’t want to waste space for information that is already out there written by others. Here is my choice of article to get the stats this year: Vertical Drama Explained
And I’ll go straight to the point.
Micro-drama is the narrative that keeps growing in the last couple of years and with 3 digit numbers at that. While Hollywood productions look like they are stuck in remakes, do-overs and brushing up spin offs in platforms like Netflix in order to get the industry moving, this format emerged, took over and the companies that own it are making huge money. Now, it also got even more interesting as I started digging into it.
Where did this come from?
Well once you get hooked onto C-drama, there is no escape. Sooner or later you end up watching one of those vertical dramas, too. Then I discovered they are actually a thing and a huge one at that. I understand the format, I love it, I know how it works and my initial verticals were Chinese productions that got me hooked exactly because of the format. Instead of being bored in your 5 min or just scroll mindlessly through multiple shifting topics, you could easily just follow a story. It is like reading a book but in a couple of minutes while waiting somewhere.
My initial reaction: ohhh the contradiction between the two formats. Where did this come from and how come it slipped through censorship, Chinese culture contradictions and all those very different narratives than the long-form C-drama like Pursuit of Jade.
Where short drama was born?
C-drama as a term holds two very different formats in itself – long-form drama, think “Pursuit of Jade”, “Shine on Me” or “Love Between Fairy and Devil” and short-form drama also referred to as micro-drama or vertical drama think “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” or “Fated to My Forbidden Alpha”.
Long-form drama in China is subject to serious regulations and it has to pass NRTA pre-publication approval which includes everything – from screen to cast and content of the actual drama produced. The streaming platforms like WeTV, Mango TV, iQIYI and others are all licensed and fall under that regulation. That being said, conclusions can be drawn and the fact that the narratives are being carefully curated actually shows exactly the level of commitment and attention China applies to the segment. Additionally the whole approval system is hard to navigate, slow and expensive I would imagine, so not every media can actually afford to handle this and still be competitive.
On the other hand the media environment had a blind spot and platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou became the natural home of this gap exactly due to the fact that they were governed under a completely different regulation which was more relaxed in a way. So naturally those platforms became the living testing area for volume, speed and testing against audiences without being affected by pre-publication approval regulations. In 2019 Kuaishou made the format official and launched its own micro-drama brand named Xingmang project in 2020. Pandemic lockdowns did the format a huge favor. It confirmed the format credibility and at the same time sped up the growth. In 2022 one of the current dominant platforms ReelShort was born overseas and it served as a signature of the expansion internationally.
What thrived in the gap?
The short answer – nothing like you would imagine if you come from long-form C-drama and exactly what it actually regulated. Explicit, provocative, wishful, incorporating a straightforward picture of family conflicts, revenge and even what I would describe as sexual innuendo.
Next Chinese regulatory quickly caught up on the gap and in a short period applied specific regulations to the genre in a campaign that led to the removal of 25,300 micro-dramas in total for pornographic, bloody, violent, low-brow and vulgar content. (Reuters, September 21, 2024) That is over 1.4 million series in total, which was followed by a wave of self-regulation of platforms to align with the regulations by removing more content for conflict amplifications in family relations (Douyin) and deviation from the main values in society (Kuaishou).
Here it is very important to note one additional nuance in general which is related to the country’s policy towards family values and a constant direction towards building a credible environment for those to grow, which in many cases is the opposite of what’s showcased in micro-dramas.
The end result from the regulation process is worth explaining as it directly impacts the industry fragmentation and who is left on top of the production chain. With higher regulations come higher costs and smaller producers hardly catch up, due to that in the last 3 years there is a different process going internally in the country – one of consolidation. Additionally, it looks like the cycle will close with that as the content that actually came to life because of a gap is being addressed and put in a regulation frame thus the frame is changing it as well.
A few numbers to make a point
I know this is already out there but we need a few numbers to back up the big picture here, so if you already came prepared skip it.
The domestic market is projected to reach $16.2B in China alone by 2030, 11.5% CAGR. Nearly 830 million viewers consume micro-dramas in China, nearly 60% paying for content or making transactions. (Source: Media Partners Asia)
The International Market looks promising with January–August 2025: overseas micro-drama market total revenue $1.52B, year-on-year increase 194.9%. (Source: China Netcasting Services Association White Paper 2025). And the US market with $819M in 2024 took the lead in all international markets. It is projected to climb to $3.8B by 2030. (Source: Media Partners Asia)
The actors environment
The actors: do they have a career or just land a gig? My first instinct when I started watching vertical dramas was that the actors are invisible. Just hired faces. The format felt too fast and mechanical to build anything around a person. My assumption was that nobody watching a 90-second episode was paying attention to who was in it.
It turns out that my assumption was so Western of me.
In China, short dramas built a new actor economy from scratch. A real one, with a career ladder, a star system, and serious money at the top. The tier system runs from extras earning 80-100 yuan a day all the way to top performers at over 40,000 yuan per day. Names matter in China. Schedules of the popular actors fill in months in advance and producers need to plan early. The prestige question took longer to settle than the money question but now it is present. The actor Liu Boyang described his first short drama shoot as jarring. A dozen people. No ceremony. Two DSLR cameras and what he called outrageous plots. He lowered his head in the group photo terrified someone would recognise him on social media and asked himself – am I going backward? In 2025 short drama actors appeared collectively at the Haikou Starlight Awards. In this case the money came first and the recognition followed a bit later. The US is a completely different story. When the format moved to American production it brought the know-how of the model and hired local actors as production inputs. The pay is genuinely good. Where Hollywood extras once earned $200 a day, Chinese short drama crews now offer up to $1,500. For actors who spent years doing background work in the traditional Hollywood system this is the best-paying gig available. The thing is though on one market the role comes with substance on the other comes with a paycheck and that is it. Sustainability is what China gives its actors in that sphere. Being outsourced and fit for the American market builds just a product to be consumed and move forward.
Where the different audiences actually clash culturally
Americans are urban women aged 30-60 with affinity towards romance, CEO storylines and revenge narratives. Those have been fed to them for ages by this kind of romance books popular for a very long while and promoted via New York Times and other popular mainstream media. So naturally they are somehow either replacing or just adding to their preferences the new format gravitating towards the same storylines. The demographic overlaps with the long-form C-drama fanbase but while the audience for this seeks the foreign culture richness and differences, the micro-drama consumers are actually completely based on the format, storyline and delivery rather than the actual culture.
On the other hand audience preferences vary between regions as well: East Asian viewers may go for CEO characters, while western ones go for crime or sport genres and on a completely different note come the Middle East and Indian audience where religion plays a role in the content topics, too.
The clash came when the micro-drama actually became popular enough to think about exporting them adequately once the format was verified as credible outside of China. The early attempts for dubbing (as I mentioned in a different article) could make your ears bleed and not to mention the plots that were acceptable for the Chinese audience, were sometimes a bit confusing for the American audience. The solution to this was to actually repeat the format but with local actors for the audience in America. Performing a blend between narratives popular in the US (a good example is werewolf romance) and Chinese fantasy and revenge stories was the right approach. Soon after, the actual origin became invisible and irrelevant. The model proved successful with any choice of location and actors.
I am just leaving this quote from Nan Yapeng, VP Crazy Maple Studio (owner of ReelShort) to settle a bit: ‘We can launch a new series every day, as we have the largest industrialized production capacity for micro-dramas in North America.’ What makes an impression on me for this one though is that it is purely production-oriented rather than a particular story spin-off.
At the same time what the viewer buys is the instant emotional gratification in 90-second units. What they don’t know they’re buying is actually the Chinese narrative engine.
Where does this lead us to in the end
I’ve got a very interesting observation to make. 90% of the world’s top 20 micro-drama apps by revenue are backed by Chinese companies and that single number is where the whole picture shifts. (Source: 2025 Micro-Drama Industry Ecosystem Insight Report, December 2025 Summit) For decades, the Western model in China was structurally identical to what Chinese short drama has now built in Western markets. Western brands used Chinese labour, Chinese manufacturing, Chinese cost advantage, while retaining ownership of the IP, the platform, the brand, and the margin. The factory was in Shenzhen. The value was in Cupertino. Chinese short drama reversed this completely. Currently, the cast is in Los Angeles, the writers are American and the locations are Western. The IP library is in Beijing and the platform infrastructure is Chinese-controlled. The payment rails and the algorithm belong to ByteDance and Tencent. The factory is now in Hollywood, while the value is in Shanghai.