Micro dramas

 

Anish Moonka

@anishmoonka

Those one-minute drama clips you keep seeing on your phone (billionaire romances, revenge plots that end on a cliffhanger every 60 seconds) are part of a $7 billion industry in China. They now make more money there than they do from actual movie theaters. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, already has a micro-drama app in China with 250 million monthly users. The average person spends over 100 minutes a day watching. Three years ago, this industry barely existed. $500 million in 2021. $7 billion by 2024. 662 million people in China watch these now. Each show has 60 to 100 episodes, about a minute or two each, filmed vertically so you watch them the same way you scroll TikTok. Soap operas, but each episode is the length of a single TikTok video. So when TikTok files a US trademark for "TikTok Drama," quietly launches a separate app called PineDrama in the US and Brazil, and starts casting actors for original shows this month, they know exactly what they're doing. They already have the playbook. It already works. One show, "The Divorced Billionaire Heiress" (the title alone tells you everything about the genre), cost less than $200,000 to make. It pulled in roughly $35 million in North America. A full season costs $100,000 to $300,000. Unknown actors and small crews. Full seasons filmed in under two weeks. In 2020, a Hollywood executive named Jeffrey Katzenberg raised $1.75 billion to build something basically like this. Short shows for your phone. He hired Steven Spielberg. He spent $100,000 per minute of content. Dead in six months. The whole library got sold to Roku for under $100 million. Quibi spent more on a single Super Bowl ad ($5.6 million) than most micro-dramas cost to produce an entire season. An app called ReelShort does the exact same format. Chinese-backed, same cheap production model. It hit 370 million downloads and $700 million in revenue last year. The global micro-drama market is on track to reach $26 billion by 2030, according to research firm Media Partners Asia. TikTok has one thing none of these apps can match. 1.6 billion users are already on the platform. Every other micro-drama app spends 80 to 90 percent of its budget on ads to find viewers. TikTok already knows who watches what and can put a show directly in front of the exact person who would binge it. TikTok Shop moved $33 billion worth of products in 2024. In China, brands like Starbucks and KFC already make micro-dramas in which their products are woven into the story. Picture watching a 90-second episode and buying what the character is wearing before the next one loads. ByteDance made roughly $186 billion in revenue last year. They watched this format go from nothing to bigger than China's entire movie theater business in four years. Now they're bringing it to the US.