Markets & Countries

The birthplace of vertical drama, and the market that already left the paywall behind. The reversal took two years: 70% of the market ran on paid unlocks in 2023, 66% is free and ad-funded in 2025. Duanju revenue passed the national box office in 2024 — CNY 50.44B against CNY 47B, with 662 million viewers — and ran at roughly twice the box office in 2025 per the NRTA. The centre of gravity is Hongguo, ByteDance's free ad-funded app, which peaked at 304M monthly users in February 2026 — but read that against the CNNIC count, because the two point in opposite directions: the national audience has stopped growing, 662M at end-2024 against 664M at end-2025, with penetration slipping from 59.7% to 59.0%. One app is taking share inside a market that has stopped adding people. Growth of a platform is not growth of a market. Regulation is the other half of the story: mandatory on-screen AI labelling since September 2025, licensing thresholds raised in January 2026 (CNY 1M standard, CNY 3M for key titles), 25,000+ episodes pulled in earlier sweeps, a two-month NRTA campaign opened in June 2026 against eight banned content categories — 670 AI-made dramas sanctioned in Q1 alone — and, on 24 June, draft Administrative Measures giving the format its legal definition: serialised, episodes under twenty minutes, three tiers by investment scale.

The biggest paying market outside China, and the one where the coin model is running out of room. ReelShort holds around 70% of it, on 70M+ monthly users and 35% of its own user base. The market quadrupled in 2025 on $700M of in-app purchases — but average revenue per daily active user fell from above $2.50 to under $0.50 over the same stretch (Naavik / Sensor Tower). A 60-episode series costs about $100,000 to make here, and since October 2025 SAG-AFTRA has covered the format with a dedicated Verticals agreement.

The one large market where a local player leads. Kuku TV — built by Mebigo Labs alongside audio app Kuku FM — holds more than 41% of it on 36.7M monthly users, sells subscriptions rather than coins (INR 899 a year), and counts cricketer MS Dhoni as investor and ambassador. Its audience is over 90% male, the exact inverse of the Western apps. The group has filed confidentially for an IPO at ₹2,500–3,500 crore. India is also the fastest lane for foreign apps: NetShort grew 193% month over month in January 2026. Lumikai projects the market at $1.5B.

The proving ground for the mid-tier apps. ShortMax's top three markets are all here — Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines — and it booked $7.2M in May 2025 alone, up 279% in a single month. DramaWave, run out of Singapore, draws 72% of its downloads from Southeast Asia and Latin America combined. ReelShort now carries 300 Thai-dubbed titles and sells through telco bundles at around $1.15.

A concentrated market rather than an emerging one. In the Gulf, four apps — DramaBox, Kuku TV, NetShort and ReelShort — together hold just over half of monthly users, with the next ten sharing about 40% (Omdia / Media City Qatar, May 2026). High ARPU potential, Arabic-language production still thin, and an Indian app in the leading quartet, which tells you how much of the audience is expatriate.

The first region outside Asia where the majors produce in the local language rather than dub. ReelShort runs local-language production in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, and launched Married at First Sight in Brazil with Endemol Shine Brasil. TikTok chose Brazil alongside the United States for PineDrama's January 2026 launch. And in Mexico, DramaBox already beats Prime Video on daily usage: 27.9 minutes against 23.8 (Omdia, February 2026).

Europe watches little and is sold a lot: about 4% of global vertical drama viewing time, but close to 29.7% of the format's worldwide ad impressions. Budgets have climbed from €50–80K per format to around €200K for a mid-tier series. The UK counts 8.2M microdrama monthly users (Omdia), and 2026 brought two native experiments: Epis, launched 14 July by RoseBerry Media with 100+ titles licensed from A+E, All3Media, Banijay and Cineflix catalogues, and Shambles, a vertical comedy sold at a flat £1.49 for the whole season — neither coins nor subscription.

The market that does not exist yet, and knows it. The 2025 baseline counted zero formal native micro-drama platforms; 2026 brought the first claimants, CliffBox launching on 13 May as "the continent's first dedicated vertical drama app" — a primacy contested by Hektik and EbonyLife ON Plus. Economics are a full order of magnitude below the rest of the world: under $20,000 a series, around $10,000 for thirty episodes, up to $1,500 for a script. The monetisation rails are mobile money, not card — Flutterwave, Paystack, M-Pesa, Interswitch, Airtel Money. Forecast for May 2027: 20 to 50 African titles in market.