Introduction
Short drama — also called microdrama or vertical short drama — is the fastest-growing content category streaming has produced in years, and it didn’t get there with a subscription. It got there with a currency.
Episodes run sixty to ninety seconds. A series runs eighty to a hundred episodes. The first few are free, and then the story stops on an engineered cliffhanger, and the only way past it is to pay — not a monthly fee, but ten to twenty cents for one more episode, in coins bought in packs or earned by watching an ad, completing a streak, or referring a friend. It’s less like a streaming subscription and more like mobile-game currency, applied to television.
That shift in mechanic is also a shift in what’s hard to build. The format itself — nine-by-sixteen video, a fast-cutting cliffhanger script, a distribution deal — is now well understood, and dozens of platforms run it well. What’s hard is the coin wallet underneath it: holding purchased and earned balances apart, applying different rules to each, reconciling against a payment provider every single day, and never double-spending a credit. Get the format right and you’ve built a content product. Get the wallet right and you’ve built a business.
The market, in numbers
Short drama’s growth has been genuinely fast, and the numbers back it up.
ReelShort, the category leader, went from $97 million in revenue in 2023 to $400 million in 2024, $785 million in 2025, and a projected $1.05 billion in 2026 — its first year of profit at scale, according to a Media Partners Asia report covered by Variety and Deadline. Outside China alone, the category is on track to reach $3.6 billion in revenue in 2026, per Screen Daily. Broader market-sizing estimates vary considerably depending on methodology and what’s counted — from roughly $11 billion globally in 2025 (Omdia) to considerably higher longer-range forecasts from industry trackers — which is normal for a category this young, but the direction is not in question.
Engagement tells the same story from a different angle. Omdia’s research, presented at Content Americas, found that microdramas have overtaken traditional streamers on mobile engagement time in some markets — a notable milestone given how recently the format existed at any scale.
None of that growth has come cheap, though. Per the same Media Partners Asia analysis, user acquisition consumed roughly 55% of ReelShort’s revenue in 2025, projected to fall to 44% by 2028 as the platform matures — with every percentage point of improvement worth an estimated $10.5 million in EBITDA at its current scale. Acquisition, not content, is currently the biggest line item in the category’s economics — which is exactly why what happens after a user is acquired matters so much.
The mechanic: how a microdrama platform actually gets paid
Nearly every serious short-drama platform runs a version of the same waterfall:
- Episodes one through five or one through ten are free. Zero friction, no registration required.
- The paywall lands on an engineered cliffhanger. Scripts are written backwards from the paywall position, not forwards from the plot.
- The viewer has three ways through it: spend coins, watch a rewarded ad, or subscribe.
- Coins are priced at roughly $0.10–$0.20 per episode, sold in packs from around $4.99 up to $99.99, with bonus coins at higher price tiers.
- Rewarded ads are capped — typically around five a day — after which the only path forward is purchase.
- Content has a long tail. Titles that have run their course on the flagship app often migrate to FAST and CTV channels for a second life.
It’s a genuinely well-designed system for a genuinely impulsive purchase decision — small amounts, spent in the moment, at the exact point of narrative tension.
Why the wallet is the hardest part to build
The format is the visible part of a microdrama platform. The economics are the hard part, and most of that difficulty sits in the wallet.
Purchased and earned coins can’t be treated as one balance. Apple and Google require app developers to keep purchased and earned (promotional) currency separate, because the two carry different refund, expiry and tax treatment. A team that models coins as a single number discovers this the hard way, usually during an app store review.
Store commission is the single biggest lever on margin. Apple and Google can extract a commission of up to 30% on in-app purchases — which is precisely why the platforms now leading on profitability have shifted meaningful volume to direct, web-based checkout. Combined with ad revenue, which also bypasses platform fees entirely, that shift accounts for close to half of the margin expansion the category’s leaders are now reporting.
Earning has to be real-time, not batch. A daily streak, an ad-completion credit, a referral bonus, a profile-completion reward — each has to post to the right pocket, under the right rule, the moment it’s earned, with an authorisation check before every coin is spent so a viewer never unlocks an episode they haven’t actually paid for.
Reconciliation happens against a payment provider every day, not every month. At the volumes short drama runs — thousands of sub-dollar transactions per title, per day — a wallet that reconciles weekly, or approximately, isn’t a wallet a finance team can sign off on.
None of this is a content problem. It’s a financial-infrastructure problem wearing a content industry’s clothes, and it’s why teams that set out to build a short-drama platform routinely discover that the wallet, not the player, is the longest pole in the tent.
The next monetisation layer: funded offers and telco bundles
Coins are the first monetisation layer. The second is starting to show up: someone other than the viewer, or the platform, funding part of the cost.
A studio can fund a discount against its own title, to drive completions on a series it has a stake in. A distributor with a large catalogue can sponsor a discount cohort to drive engagement across titles it’s trying to break out. And telecom operators — who already understand bundling better than almost anyone — are moving fastest of all. AIS in Thailand and Globe in the Philippines have both launched co-branded short-drama add-ons bundled with mobile data, in deals structured so the telco keeps its network, its billing relationship and its brand, while a third party funds and settles the content economics behind it (Resonate; Hollywood Reporter). Thailand’s telecom press has started calling this the “360-degree model” — distribution through the app and the mobile network simultaneously, funded and settled between two parties instead of run by either alone.
That’s a multi-party settlement problem: an operator, an aggregator, a studio and a platform all need their share of a transaction reconciled automatically, on award, on redemption, or on spend — not manually, and not monthly.
Where CRM.COM fits
CRM.COM isn’t a video platform, and doesn’t try to be one. We’re the money layer underneath vertical short drama, not the video layer: your player, your DRM, your CDN and your ad mediation all stay exactly as they are.
What we bring is the part most teams building this from scratch discover is the longest pole — a ledger-grade wallet that holds purchased and earned coins apart, with separate rules for each; an earning engine for streaks, ad-completion credit, referrals and milestones that’s configured rather than coded; the ability for a studio, distributor or telco to fund an offer against a title or a cohort, with settlement handled automatically; and multi-party revenue share across operator, aggregator, studio and platform, reconciled on every transaction rather than at the end of the month.
If you’re building a short-drama service, or a telco looking to bundle one, that’s the layer we already run. Explore how the wallet and funded, multi-party settlement work, or see how it all fits inside our broader video and media platform.
Talk to us about short drama monetisation →
Product Marketing Manager, CRM.COM
B2B SaaS Sales & Product Marketing nerd by day, growth whisperer by night.
Here for the retention, not the churn.
