As the global microdrama industry races toward $26 billion in revenues by 2030, a diverse constellation of operators, platforms, content suppliers and infrastructure providers has emerged to capitalize on vertical storytelling’s explosive growth. Here’s the essential guide to the key players shaping the industry’s future.

The Chinese Powerhouses

ByteDance (Red Fruit), Tencent (WeChat Video Accounts) and Kuaishou (Xi Fan) dominate China’s microdrama ecosystem, which generated $7 billion in 2024 and will exceed $9.4 billion this year. Each has built dedicated apps and distribution rails tightly integrated with social and payments ecosystems, separate from their premium long-form video offerings. Their competitive advantage lies in controlling both content and infrastructure, managing customer acquisition costs while maintaining direct relationships with audiences.

COL (China Online Literature) functions as a major content engine for the industry. The company provides extensive IP pipelines from its web novel library, which fuels the major platforms’ content factories. “We started this platform back in 2021 in China, and with the IPs that we had, it became a huge, massive hit,” explains Timothy Oh Jia Wei, the company’s general manager. “We actually got 20% of the market share in China from the get go.” Other online lit giants China Literature and Tomato Novel also supply the intellectual property that ByteDance, Tencent, and Kuaishou convert into serialized vertical dramas.

Liu Yi Media, founded in 2022 by author Mo Jian (Shao Ye), produces 20-plus original short dramas a month and holds a library exceeding 500 titles.

The U.S. Market

DramaBox has emerged as the profitability standard-bearer in the U.S. market. According to Media Partners Asia, the platform reported $323 million in revenue and $10 million in net profit in 2024 while growing rapidly in 2025. Its model blends subscriptions, episodic unlocks and advertising, demonstrating that sustainable economics are achievable outside China.

ReelShort has captured greater scale, reaching approximately $400 million in 2024, but remains loss-making due to heavy marketing costs and content amortization, according to research firm Media Partners Asia. COL owns a 49% stake in Crazy Maple Studio — the studio behind ReelShort. The platform’s challenge exemplifies the industry’s central tension: customer acquisition expenses often consume revenues before unit economics turn positive.

COL’s FlareFlow, launched in April 2025, has quickly climbed entertainment-app charts in multiple markets; third-party tracking shows top-five placements in several countries.

ShortMax is an active entrant with store listings and marketing activity.

The Korean Innovators

Vigloo (SpoonLabs) is applying Korea’s proven entertainment export model to microdramas. Founded by Neil Choi and backed by $86 million from gaming giant Krafton, Vigloo’s content managers hail from Disney and CJ ENM. The platform is producing original IP for U.S., Korean and Japanese markets with local creator partnerships, offering over 300 premium dramas and planning to release more than 100 original U.S. series by the end of 2025. “Our strategy is to take that proven storytelling DNA and adapt it for the vertical viewing format by partnering with local teams to tailor content for local audiences,” Choi explains. Nearly half of Vigloo’s revenue now comes from the U.S. market.

Watcha launched Shortcha in 2024 as a dedicated microdrama service featuring content from South Korea, China, Japan and the U.S., while Tving introduced a vertical short-form video section the same year, initially focusing on highlights from its library before planning original microdrama launches. Topreels represents another Korean platform entering the space, though the market remains fragmented as multiple players test different approaches to vertical storytelling.

The Marketing and Strategy Layer

QianFan represents the critical infrastructure layer that makes microdrama economics work or fail. The traffic marketing agency rolls over $50 million annually across Meta, Instagram, TikTok and other global ad networks, managing campaigns with ROI ranging between 0.7 and 1.6 depending on titles. With hundreds of creative materials deployed per title across a matrix of channels and formats, QianFan exemplifies the data-intensive, performance-driven approach required to acquire audiences profitably. “An in-depth study of daily data and responses plus an instant reaction from data into action is crucial to win,” the company states.

AR Asia brings operational expertise and strategic perspective to the industry’s evolution. Chief operating officer and co-founder Ronan Wong frames microdramas within the broader context of casual gaming, suggesting that similar patterns of rapid scaling followed by consolidation may emerge. The company also functions as a key facilitator connecting platforms, production houses and distribution channels across the global microdrama ecosystem.

The Content Creators

Lunar Ticks, the Los Angeles-based writing team of Justin Saucedo and Vivian “Anan” Wang, bridges Chinese and American production ecosystems. The married duo leverages their bicultural expertise — Saucedo worked in China during the co-production boom of the 2010s, while Wang is fully immersed in the Chinese film and TV industry. They’ve transitioned from traditional screenwriting to become specialists in vertical storytelling, working on both original IP and platform commissions. “Writing verticals is a crash course in identifying what is unnecessary and deleting it,” they observe.

Production houses are also entering the microdrama space across Asia. Bamboo is among a new generation of Korean studios specializing in microdramas, supplying content to platforms including Vigloo and Watcha. In Kazakhstan, Salem Social Media has built a large vertical-video operation, signaling the format’s expansion into Central Asia.

Holywater recently attracted investment from Fox Entertainment, signaling traditional media’s growing interest in the vertical space. Co-founders and co-CEOs Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov represent a new wave of operators attempting to bring Hollywood production values and IP development expertise to the microdrama format. “Our goal essentially is to build the leader in the niche,” Nesvit explains. “We see this as huge potential to build a new era of video streaming for mobile phones.” The Fox partnership gives Holywater access to studio IP and talent while Fox gains user data and distribution into vertical formats. “We are building a network that discovers great IPs on scale, repurposes those IPs in different forms, and then distributes those IPs efficiently to the audience where the audience actually is,” Nesvit says.

The Emerging Players

Crisp, founded by Adrian Cheng — the entrepreneur behind K11’s “cultural commerce” model and the new Almad Group conglomerate — is positioning itself as a bridge between Asian and global markets. Cheng’s convening of the Seoul conference the Future Is Vertical signals his ambition to play a central role in shaping the industry’s next phase. Asahi Television Broadcasting Corporation

Traditional broadcasters are also beginning to explore the format. Asahi Television Broadcasting Corporation in Japan represents the potential for established media companies to leverage their content libraries and production infrastructure for vertical adaptation as the format matures. “In Japan, smartphone-based short viewing has become a daily habit, creating an environment where short and microdramas naturally function as gateways to broadcast and streaming — and as amplifiers that extend existing IP,” explains Shin Iida, general manager of Asahi Television Broadcasting Corporation’s general programming division. The broadcaster sees microdramas as part of a circular model where short-form content can be tested, scaled up, and integrated with traditional television and streaming.

In India’s nascent market, Kuku TV has secured VC funding and grown to approximately 5 million paying subscribers with around 35 million monthly active users. “India has a huge opportunity, because we have such a massive mobile base — the second-largest mobile base in the world, right after China,” notes Vivek Couto of Media Partners Asia. However, business models are still being tested, with advertising expected to play a more important monetization role than subscriptions in the near term.

Also Shaping the Landscape

Beyond the dominant operators, a new wave of broadcasters, regional platforms and technology providers is expanding the vertical-video ecosystem. In China, traditional streamers iQIYI and Bilibili have each launched dedicated short-drama divisions, testing serialized mini-dramas within their apps to retain younger audiences. In Korea, CJ ENM’s tvN D Studio and SBS Mobidrama are repurposing broadcast-style storytelling for mobile. Japan’s TV Tokyo Digital Studio is experimenting with vertical spinoffs of its drama and anime properties, and Line Next has begun integrating short-form video with its social and payments ecosystem.

In Southeast Asia, True ID has emerged as Thailand’s biggest platform, pivoting from long-form to short-form content with TrueID Originals building a localized vertical content slate. Vidio, Indonesia’s largest platform, is developing Vidio Shorts as part of its vertical strategy. Viu Shorts in Hong Kong is piloting similar initiatives across Asia. On the analytics and infrastructure side, firms such as Media Partners Asia, Data.ai and Sensor Tower are supplying market intelligence, while AI-dubbing specialists Deepdub and Dubverse are enabling faster, low-cost localization for international distribution.

Platform Courtship

Beyond dedicated microdrama operators, the industry’s future may be shaped by major technology platforms’ strategic interest. TikTok for Business and Google are keynote speakers at Crisp’s the Future Is Vertical conference in Seoul, signaling growing platform engagement with microdrama producers and the potential for distribution scale that could bypass standalone apps entirely.

The winners in this rapidly consolidating landscape will be operators that control distribution and monetization infrastructure, manage customer acquisition costs efficiently and build sustainable IP pipelines — precisely the combination that remains elusive for most players outside China’s integrated ecosystem.