ReelShort is on track for $1 billion: how Chinese microdramas conquered the global phone screen
Media Partners Asia projects ReelShort will hit about $1.05 billion in 2026 revenue and its first meaningful profit. Chinese-style vertical drama is no longer a novelty. It is a phone-screen business with mostly Western wallets.
Mina Park
The living-room streamers spent a decade arguing over who owned the weekend binge.
ReelShort is building a different prize: the phone in line at Target. Media Partners Asia, the Singapore research firm, projects the Crazy Maple Studio app will generate about $1.05 billion in revenue in 2026, up 34 percent, and post its first meaningful profit at scale, around $40 million net.
That number is a forecast, not an audited filing. Treat it as a serious market estimate. Even with that caveat, the signal is blunt. Chinese-style vertical microdrama is no longer a novelty genre. It is a category with unit economics.
Our read: the format won because it was designed for thumbs and cliffhangers, not for prestige. Netflix can license the vibe. Copying the machine is harder.
The revenue milestone
MPA’s report, ReelShort / Crazy Maple Studio: Inside the US$1B Micro-Drama Machine, maps a steep climb: $97 million in 2023, $400 million in 2024, $785 million in 2025. After an estimated $12 million net loss last year, the firm models $63 million of EBITDA and that first real profit in 2026.
The wider outside-China microdrama market sits near $3.6 billion this year on MPA’s count, on a path toward $9.5 billion by 2031. ReelShort leads with an estimated 29 percent share, ahead of DramaBox, DramaWave, NetShort, and GoodShort.
Consumer payments and subscriptions still do most of the work, about 85 to 90 percent of revenue. Advertising is rising fast enough that MPA expects it near 15 percent by 2028. Margins improve as marketing takes a smaller bite and more billing moves to ReelShort’s own web store, where Apple and Google do not take their cut.
Vivek Couto, MPA’s CEO, framed the shift cleanly: microdrama has begun to be an earnings story rather than only a growth story.
How the addiction is built
A ReelShort season is usually 70 to 80 episodes of one to two minutes each, shot for a vertical phone. The first stretch is free. Then the plot hits a cliffhanger and the app asks for coins, a subscription pass, or an ad watch.
That is Chinese duanju grammar, adapted for English-speaking phones. Scripts are often written toward the paywall. The drama is not waiting for episode six to raise the stakes. It raises them every couple of minutes.
Crazy Maple Studio, based in Sunnyvale and partly owned by Beijing digital publisher COL Group, launched ReelShort in 2022 under founder and CEO Joey Jia. Jia has said downloads were never the dream. Diversified content for different audience segments was. The platform now claims more than 286 million downloads, tens of millions of monthly users, and a production network that feeds romance, revenge, fantasy, and billionaire-secret plots at industrial pace.
For diaspora readers who already know China’s AI microdrama factory floor, ReelShort is the Western-facing storefront of a related idea: compress a soap into phone length, then sell the next click.
Chinese roots, non-Asian wallets
The format is Chinese. The money is not mostly Chinese.
MPA estimates about 70 million global monthly users in 2026. Latin America and Asia Pacific together make up roughly three in five of those users, yet generate under a fifth of revenue. North America delivers about 59 percent of revenue from a much smaller slice of the user base.
That mismatch is the business. English-language titles with Western-looking casts convert hard in North America. Viewers do not need to know COL Group’s Shenzhen listing to finish The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband. The cultural export is the pacing and the paywall, not the passport of the lead actor.
Asia is still the growth bet. Thailand’s AIS telco partnership already moved the needle. Indonesia and the Philippines deals are expected by year-end. Japan and Korea co-productions, including work with Showbox, are slated for the fourth quarter. Closing the user-to-revenue gap outside North America is where MPA sees the upside.
Can Netflix-era TV imitate this?
Legacy streamers are circling. Peacock put a short-term slate of ReelShort titles into its mobile app in May, ahead of Bravo original microdramas. Netflix has used vertical clips more as a discovery surface than as a coin-unlock original library. That distinction matters.
Netflix’s model sells a monthly pass for long-form prestige and comfort. ReelShort’s model sells urgency: pay now or wait behind an ad. Established studios can hire vertical directors and buy romance IP. They struggle to rebuild a whole product culture around two-minute chapters, aggressive social acquisition, and scripts engineered for the unlock screen.
Imitation will look like licensing first, then a few branded experiments, then an argument inside every streamer about whether coin drama cannibalizes the living-room subscription. Peacock’s move says the minutes are already contested. ReelShort’s billion-dollar path says the contest is not theoretical.
Our verdict
ReelShort’s forecast is the receipt that phone-first Chinese microdrama grammar can mint Western cash at scale.
Watch whether North America stays the profit engine while Asia and Latin America stay the user engine. Watch whether Peacock and its peers graduate from licensing spicy titles to owning the paywall. And watch the adjacent AI overseas scroll story: the factory and the storefront are converging.
For Netflix-era television, the uncomfortable lesson is simple. The next billion-dollar screen may not be the one on the wall.
