Hollywood is fond of a little drama, for all the wrong reasons

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What if you could make hundreds of millions of dollars with cheaply produced content, all while avoiding powerful distribution platforms like Netflix and YouTube? This promise is at the core of Hollywood’s latest craze: microdrama, a new form of storytelling that originated in China, has gained traction in India, and is now sweeping the United States.

There have been countless stories in Hollywood trade magazines and trade publications alike in recent months about apps like ReelShort, DramaBox, and ShortMax. These applications should be ready to build $1.3 billion in revenue in the US alone this year, with estimates for global revenues About 8 billion dollars.

This has led to a number of Hollywood companies jumping on the bandwagon: Cineverse and Banyan Ventures have teamed up on a new service called Microco,e! Entertainment Television founder Alan Mruvka is preparing to launch a microdrama app Verza TVAnd Fox has Invested in holy waterthe startup behind the mini drama app My Drama.

There have also been a bunch of stories about these being produced on mobile first, with filming underway Low budget, Non-unionAnd perhaps sometimes, Exploitative.

But little attention has been paid to the audience for these shows. All those stories about explosive growth and huge revenue estimates ignore what it means for consumers who actually use the Little Drama app. So I decided to download ReelShort, the most popular microdrama app in the US, and take one for the team.

more Candy Crush From Quibi

First things first: Little Drama is not like Quibi. Jeffrey Katzenberg’s failed attempt to create a Netflix for short-form content relied on expensive Hollywood talent and huge production budgets, all while completely ignoring the world of short-form social video.

Little Drama is basically the opposite. They’re low-budget, highly shareable shows made up of dozens of one- to two-minute episodes based on successful romance tropes. It seems like every other show has a handsome billionaire willing to risk his reputation in order to free a damsel in distress trapped in a relationship with an abusive partner. Oh, and the billionaire is also probably into BDSM, just because. There are also plenty of disguised billionaires, stolen inheritances, and mafia villains.

It’s easy to scoff at these kinds of stories, but as someone who watches both Bridgerton and White lotusI won’t pretend to have some moral superiority. Having guilty pleasures is a good thing, actually. And ReelShort has a lot of them, all designed to hold your attention during the first five to eight one- to two-minute episodes.

Then the paywall goes up, and you’ll be surprised: Unlimited access to the app’s catalog costs $19.99 per week. In other words: a month of viewing costs about 10 times as much as Netflix’s cheapest tier.

There is also a $200 per year subscription, and viewers can choose to unlock individual episodes by purchasing coin packs. Unlocking an entire season of a show with these packages can cost between $30 to $50 on average. Which seems reasonable, except for the fact that many of these seasons, when watched in one sitting, are about the length of an average movie.

A ReelShort representative didn’t respond to questions about the app’s pricing, but ReelShort and other apps like it will tell you that viewers don’t have to pay at all to watch. That’s technically true: Every day, you can watch a few extra episodes of your favorite show — say, two or three episodes — for free. After that, the freemium wall appears, asking you to pay. Back off, and you’re instead offered to watch ads to continue.

Except you’re never sure how long. One day, watching an ad might unlock two episodes of the show. The next day, the same ad only gives you access to one episode. A lack of predictability seems to be a key element in the manipulation of ReelShort’s reward system, as is the constant promise of getting lucky. Once your ads are almost finished running, a pop-up will appear reminding you to use the app’s check-in system. That’s 20 coins right there!

Of course, opening an episode or two will cost you 60 coins. It’s nice that you also get rewards for the time you spend watching. Ten minutes of viewing time nets you 30 coins, which sounds great, until you remember that each episode is only a minute or two long. At this point, you might consider starting a new series so you can continue watching the series you intended to watch in the first place.

There are a few ways to earn coins on ReelShort, and they are mostly geared toward making the app more present in your life. Turning on your mobile phone notifications to get an endless stream of watch and check-in reminders will net you 30 coins. Giving the company your email address translates to another 30 coins. Do you follow them on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or TikTok? Another 15 coins each. And these growth hacks seem to be working for ReelShort: the company’s main Instagram account has 8.6 million followers, while its YouTube account has 9.6 million subscribers.

In addition to series-specific ads, ReelShort also allows you to watch up to 17 daily bank coin ads, with up to 20 coins per ad. This wouldn’t be so bad, if the ads weren’t so completely unbearable. In all my time on ReelShort, I’ve only seen one ad for a consumer packaged goods brand, as well as a few videos advertising Temu. The rest was marketing games and other apps, including some particularly annoying mini-game ads that seemed to be intentionally designed to make closing them nearly impossible.

Powerful freemium, designed to make you pay

Does this all sound vaguely familiar? Then you might be among the millions of people who play free games regularly. Microdrama apps have taken a lot of cues from mobile gaming, and often have direct links to that industry: Crazy Maple Studio, the company behind ReelShort, also runs a number of free-to-play games, including select titles like Transformation History: ASMR Makeup.

The company isn’t shy about this heritage: it actively promotes its free-to-play games within ReelShort, pitching them as another way to get coins. Download Crazy Maple Studio game and complete the level, you will get between 30 to 50 coins. Naturally, in each of these games, you will also have to watch ads, collect rewards, win coins…

In addition to watching a bunch of ReelShort content, I also spent a lot of time reading reviews of the app on app stores and third-party review sites. In fact, ReelShort gets very good reviews on both Google Play and the App Store, with the average app rating being 4.3 and 4.5 stars, respectively.

However, reading actual reviews tells a different story. People tend to like the shows themselves, but even five-star reviews often include complaints about the subscription price and ReelShort’s rewards system. Unsurprisingly, the same issues also dominate negative reviews of the app, with one issue being the case Discovery analysis 47.8 percent of all negative reviews were about high pricing.

Frustrating people with these vague and burdensome rewards seems to be the point, says Sasha Kaletsky, managing partner at Creator Ventures. He pointed out Earlier this year: “I call this ‘aggressive freemium’ because even though some content is available for free, the free version makes it so annoying to use…so much so that payment has almost become a requirement.”

This approach appears to be working in ReelShort’s favor: the app generated nearly half a billion in cumulative global in-app revenue by March 2025, according to SensorTower estimates. Microdrama apps also continue to see strong growth, thanks in part to significant spending on social advertising. Sensortower estimates that ReelShort competitor DramaWave accounts for more than 80 percent of its users through advertising on TikTok and elsewhere.

Spending heavily to acquire millions of users and then constantly nagging those users to pay exorbitant prices for short-term subscription packages can lead to impressive revenue numbers – the kind of numbers that get you money from venture capital firms, or perhaps Hollywood studios looking for the next big thing.

But this hardly seems like a way to build a sustainable business model. Case in point: After being asked multiple times to pay, I simply Googled the name of the show I was trying to watch. The first search result was a pirated version, uploaded to a streaming site that also hosts dozens of other shows from the app, and is frequently mentioned by ReelShort users on Reddit.

Because if you annoy your customers long enough, they’ll find their billionaire friends elsewhere.