Emily is a student by day, but works the night shift at a strip club to pay her tuition – she doesn’t think anyone will find out her secret, until one day her mysterious English teacher shows up! Did he recognize her? Will her secret get out? Pay 60 “tokens” to see what happens next, or you can watch an ad, or… just buy a VIP pass for $20 a week and skip the ads altogether.
These stories are gritty and over-the-top, filled with incredible acting and writing. However, these “micro-dramas” – TikTok-like shows with episodes lasting about a minute – make billions of dollars a year.
First popular in China, micro-drama apps are poised to have a breakout year in the US app market. According to app intelligence company Appfigures, ReelShort will reach an estimated $1.2 billion in gross consumer spending in 2025, up 119% from 2024. Another top app, DramaBox, made $276 million in gross consumer spending last year, more than doubling its 2024 figure.
The market doesn’t seem to be slowing down. TikTok just launched its own standalone micro-drama app called PineDrama and a new app from Hollywood veterans called GammaTime just raised $14 million, including checks from angel investors like Alexis Ohanian, Kris Jenner and Kim Kardashian.
It’s amazing to see small-form, scripted drama apps achieving such success when we’re only five years away from the Quibi debacle. Quibi wanted to be like Netflix, but with ten-minute episodes designed to be watched on the go. Founded by Dreamworks co-founder and former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, Quibi raised more than $1.75 billion in funding from major Hollywood studios and went on to create shows starring stars like Liam Hemsworth, Reese Witherspoon and Anna Kendrick.
Nobody wanted Quibi, and the app turned into a punch line because of how massively it crashed. But ReelShort — an app whose top shows are called “My Sister is the Warlord Queen” and “In Love with a Single Farmer-Daddy” — is a hit.
“How are they succeeding where Quibi failed? They’re basically OnlyFans for the female gaze,” Eric Wei, creator economy expert and CEO of Karat Financial, told TechCrunch. “They do romance where the titles are all like, ‘My Alpha.’ This is like ’50 Shades of Grey’, but for vertical video.”
OnlyFans isn’t the best comparison (those shows can be suggestive, though not pornographic), but Wei is right that sex sells. When a story looks like it might be heating up, you’ll be asked to watch ads or pay money to continue. But the reward is never that exciting, so you keep watching, only to see another pop-up asking for more money or some other ambiguous in-app currency.
The business model behind these apps reproduces the same dark patterns as mobile games. They are designed to attract users to free content by giving free in-app currency for logging in every day. As people spend more time on the app – which is designed to be addictive – they need more coins or tokens to unlock more episodes of a show, but there’s no way to earn enough to get their fix without spending real money.
Sometimes a mini-drama is interactive, allowing viewers to choose the path the story will take – but the good choice (the woman stands up to her abusive ex) costs tokens, while the less satisfying one (the abusive ex faces no consequences for his actions) is free.
Soon, an addicted viewer might cave and pay for the $20 ad-free weekly pass, which, after a month, will cost more than subscriptions to HBO Max, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Paramount Plus combined.
As artificial intelligence enters the picture, these companies will produce content at an even more alarming rate. LLMs aren’t able to write prestige dramas like HBO’s “Succession” or even a sitcom like “The Big Bang Theory,” but the most successful mini-dramas are so predictable and formulaic that they don’t really require much human spirit and creativity. You’d be shocked to learn how many mini-dramas begin with a scene in which a bespectacled girl is pushed under a mean classmate, only to be saved by some popular jock, who remarks that she’s actually very pretty if she takes off her glasses.
PocketFM, the Lightspeed-powered audio streaming platform, has already embraced AI. Last year, it launched a tool it calls CoPilot, which was trained on thousands of hours of content to understand the “rhythms” of a standard story, helping writers add cliffhangers or plot twists to their stories that it predicts will make audiences want to watch more. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian company Holywater, which raised 22 million dollars to fund micro-drama app My Drama, calls itself an “AI-first entertainment network.”
While micro-drama could completely go the AI way, Dhar Mann Studios CEO Sean Atkins believes there’s also an opportunity for creators.
“Think about it – short form is a little less burdensome than long form, and vertical is even more burdensome,” Atkins told TechCrunch. “I think you’re going to see some creators start to get into it quite significantly, especially because they have the experience of low-cost production.”
These companies have a great business model on their hands. But it’s one that thrives on short attention spans, in-app purchases, and adult “Cocomelon”-like content.
