Hollywood takes hours to tell a story. Short dramas? They do it in three minutes, and they're winning.
With gripping cliffhangers and binge-worthy plots, these micro-episodes 🎬are rewriting the rules of mobile entertainment and generating millions in revenue💲along the way.
According to SensorTower, short drama apps generated nearly $170 million in in-app purchase revenue over the past year in 2024. The United States emerged as the leading market, accounting for 60% of the global mobile revenue in this category.
The growth trend is unstoppable. From early 2024 to Q1 2025, in-app revenue of short drama apps grew rapidly, rising from $178 million to nearly $700 million per quarter, with cumulative revenue reaching $2.3 billion.
Dominating the scene are top players such as DramaBox, ReelShort, ShortMax, GoodShort, and NetShort, which consistently rank among the top performers 🥇 across regions, including the United States, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
The market is booming, but competition is fiercer than ever. Developers face real challenges in attracting users and growing revenue. XMP provides tools and strategies to help advertisers win in this industry. Let's dive in! 👇
What are Short Dramas?
Short dramas, also known as micro-dramas or mini-series, are bite-sized videos lasting 1–5 minutes per episode, designed for quick consumption. These fast-paced, emotionally charged stories hook viewers with cliffhangers and themes like romance, suspense, and fantasy, tailored for busy Gen Z and millennial viewers.
They typically lure viewers with free initial episodes to spark interest, then monetize through in-app purchases to unlock additional episodes or premium content. Subscription models, offering unlimited access for a monthly fee, are also common, while some apps blend ads for extra revenue.
Popular Short Drama Platform
The short drama industry is booming, with several platforms emerging as key players in different regions. Here's a look at the most popular short drama apps and their strategies for success:
ReelShort
Launched in August 2022, ReelShort rapidly climbed the ranks to dominate the US and European markets, even surpassing TikTok to claim the top spot on the US iOS Entertainment App Charts. Popular titles driving its success include My Werewolf Alpha and The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband.
Key Success Factors
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Premium Content: High production value with addictive storytelling
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Market Fit: Tailored for Western audiences' preferences
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TikTok Viral: Ad creatives sparked widespread engagement, driving a breakthrough in the US market
DramaBox
While DramaBox has seen significant revenue growth in the US, it has also built a strong user base in Southeast Asia. The platform differentiates itself by focusing on male-oriented short dramas, such as "Shadowed Thrones", catering to an underserved audience.
Key Success Factors
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Niche Targeting: Dominates the male-centric drama market
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Localized Content: Adapts storylines for both Western & Southeast Asian audiences
KuKu TV
Kuku TV is an India-based short-drama app that primarily operates on a subscription-based monetization model. Targeting audiences in India and neighboring South Asian regions, Kuku TV offers a diverse range of short dramas, including family dramas, romantic stories, suspense thrillers, and social realism themes, catering to various age groups and interests. With relatable storylines and frequent updates, Kuku TV has successfully built a loyal subscriber base.
Key Success Factors
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Strong Localization: With a deep understanding of local culture, languages, and entertainment preferences, KuKu TV offers content in multiple local languages, including Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil.
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Clear Monetization Model: Affordable subscription fees provide high value for money, reducing the psychological barrier to payment.
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Frequent Updates to Maintain Engagement: Episodes are released at a high frequency, encouraging binge-watching habits and reducing churn.
RapidTV
RapidTV, a top-tier short drama app launched in 2024, delivers 1–5 minute episodes in romance and suspense, ranking 16th on the U.S. Top Free Entertainment App Chart with 9M downloads in July 2025 (data from Sensor Tower). RapidTV thrives in Thailand, Brazil, and Mexico, with a growing global ad presence in the U.S. and Japan.
Key Success Factors
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Globalized Ad Strategy: RapidTV shifted from targeting Southeast Asia and Latin America (Indonesia, Mexico) to include the U.S., Japan, and Brazil by June 2025, optimizing user acquisition in high-growth and premium markets.
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High Engagement: Personalized recommendations and high-quality content drive strong user retention in Brazil and Mexico.
Pain Points in Short Drama App Advertising
Rising UA Costs
The market is becoming increasingly crowded, especially in key regions like the US, Southeast Asia, and India. Fierce bidding competition among short-drama apps has driven up both CPI (Cost Per Install) and CPM.
New entrants find it challenging to compete for premium ad placements where high-quality users concentrate. As a result, acquiring valuable users inevitably requires higher ad spend.
Complex Audience Targeting
Short-drama audiences are highly diverse and constantly evolving. Unlike traditional genres, short-form content consumers often jump between different storylines and genres rapidly. Viewing preferences can shift day to day, influenced by cultural trends and local tastes, which vary widely across regions.
This fluid behavior makes standard targeting methods ineffective; ads may reach many users, but struggle to engage or convert them. To drive results, advertisers must embrace flexible, data-driven strategies that can adapt quickly to changing audience patterns and regional differences.
Creative Adaptation Challenges
Each market has distinct cultural nuances, languages, and aesthetic preferences that deeply impact how content resonates with local audiences. To truly engage users, we need to extensively localize creatives to match local tastes, such as re-editing videos, re-recording voiceovers.
Without efficient localization capabilities, it can become a major bottleneck, slowing down campaign rollout and reducing agility.
XMP's Solution For Short-Drama Apps Advertising
Slash Costs with Ad Automation
XMP helps tackle high costs with advanced automation tools. ReelShort's success with our platform shows how automation can drive faster growth while slashing user acquisition costs.
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Rapidly Test to Find Market Niche
Cost is inevitable, but what results can it deliver? The best way to tackle the high advertising costs is to test the market quickly and invest the budget wisely.
XMP's Bulk Campaign Creation allows for rapid testing of multiple campaigns and creatives at one time, gathering real-time market feedback, and pinpointing the most promising opportunities with minimal spend, like "Latin American users engage more with suspense-themed episodes." Even new entrants can scale faster, securing an early lead in the market.
📍For example, a short-drama app team wanted to understand audience preferences in Thailand. Using Bulk Campaign Creation, they combined multiple show creatives to simultaneously test different genres, including thriller, romance, and domestic drama. They quickly identified romance genres resonated most with the local viewers, so they scaled romance-drama creatives right away with a bigger budget and rapidly captured the Thai market.
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Optimize Budget with AI, Avoid Waste
Monitoring campaign performance can be exhausting, especially when promoting a new short drama. XMP's Smart Assistant offers a simple solution: just set automated rules to track key metrics like CPI, budget, ROAS, and more. Once configured, it automatically adjusts campaigns, pausing or reducing budgets if CPI exceeds the set threshold, so the UA team can focus on higher-value tasks like data analysis and strategic decision-making. No more wasted spend, Smart Assistant keeps everything under control.
📍When a UA team launched campaigns for a brand-new domestic drama series across TikTok and Google, they wanted to spend smart while moving fast. Using XMP's Smart Assistant, they set two simple rules:
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Rule 1: If CPI went above $5, the campaign would automatically pause to stop budget drain.
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Rule 2: If CPI stayed under $5 and ROAS was higher than 1, the budget would automatically grow by 10% to capture more high-value viewers.
In just two weeks, their low-performing ads quietly disappeared, high-ROAS trailers kept scaling, wasted spend dropped by 18%, and installs from profitable campaigns rose by 25%.
Optimize Audience Targeting via MMP
To address the challenge of audience targeting, XMP integrates with third-party mobile attribution platforms like AppsFlyer and SolarEngine to track in-app behaviors such as subscriptions, renewals, and other events.
By analyzing user value across different retention periods, advertisers can identify high-value segments and focus their spend on audiences most likely to convert and generate long-term revenue, ensuring campaigns remain both targeted and profitable even as viewing trends shift.
📍For a real case, a short-drama app team running campaigns in Southeast Asia found that viewers drawn in by romance trailers had high install rates but low subscription renewals, while users acquired through comedy-drama teasers showed 40% higher Day-30 ROAS.
Using XMP's integration with SolarEngine, they quickly discovered this pattern, cut spending on low-value segments, and shifted budget toward the comedy-drama audience, boosting overall campaign profitability within three weeks.
Enhancing Creative Localization Efficiency
Localization and market adaptation of short-drama creatives are crucial for acquiring users globally. XMP supports advertisers in accelerating and optimizing short-drama creative localization with the following solutions:
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Share Creatives through Cloud Library
With Creative Library, short-drama app advertisers can upload all creatives at once and set flexible sharing permissions for internal teams or external localization agencies, so the right people always have access to the right assets. This ensures smoother collaboration, faster feedback cycles, and a more efficient localization process, helping UA teams quickly adapt creatives for multiple markets without delays. After all, time is money.
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Gain Creative Insights Across Regions
Advertisers can check how short-drama creatives perform across different regions in real time, tracking metrics like CTR, CPI, ROAS, and more. XMP's Creative Report automatically highlights top-performing assets, guiding the team to quickly spot which creatives resonate best with the audience, focus budget on the most promising markets, and achieve the best results even with limited resources
📍For example, a short-drama company promoting a teen mystery series in APAC markets. Using Creative Report, the team tracked CTR, CPI, and ROAS in real time and discovered that a suspenseful 15-second teaser generated high engagement in Japan, while a character-driven clip resonated more in Korea. By reallocating budget to these top-performing creatives in each region, the team increased overall ROAS by 28% within one month.
Final Thoughts
In a fast-paced short-drama market, staying ahead requires speed, insight, and agility. XMP empowers advertisers to act quickly, deliver the right content to the right viewers, and turn fleeting attention into lasting engagement and growth across markets.
About XMP
XMP is a one-stop cross-channel intelligent media buying platform dedicated to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of advertisers. It integrates global top media, SDK Ad Networks, and mobile measurement partners, and enables advertisers to manage their advertising campaigns, creatives, and data across multiple channels all in one platform. Contact the XMP team today to start your journey to success!
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