两分钟微短剧如何成为十亿美元产业

Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts radio news. Casey Esser was chasing an acting career in Los Angeles. He was balancing a full-time job as a personal trainer with occasional acting gigs. Then one day, he got the kind of phone call that anyone trying to break into the industry dreads. My agent manager at the time in 2023 were like, "Hey, you know, we think you're great, but this just isn't happening. You know, we're going to let you go."

Casey says he didn't let the bad news stop him. The next day, he started looking for auditions on his own and ended up being cast as the lead in a new series called Faded to My Forbidden Alpha. It was about an orphan maid who falls in love with a werewolf who also happens to be super rich. The series began shooting almost right away. It wasn't tied to a bigname studio or streaming platform. It was for a mobile app he'd never heard of.

People would say like, "What what did you just shoot?" And I'm like, "Oh, it's like a it's like a short form episodic." And they were like, "What's that?" And I was like, "I actually don't know."

What Casey didn't realize was that he'd stumbled into one of the fastest growing forms of entertainment, micro dramas. Microdramas are essentially mini soap operas meant to be watched on your phone. They're shot vertically, run roughly 1 to 3 minutes, and they are chalk full of over-the-top drama and camp. Think secret heirs, love triangles, and lots of dramatic face slapping.

He was in bed with me.

You're lying. Within weeks of its release, Casey's show racked up hundreds of millions of views.

I shared the poster on Instagram and in my mind I was like, "Okay, like we did that, like moving on." And then like 2 weeks later started getting messages from all these different countries. And that was my first time like going viral. I just couldn't believe how many people it reached. It changed my life completely. Since then, Casey has appeared in dozens of micro dramas. The craze that began in China has spread to the rest of the world and now the broader entertainment business.

By some estimates, 1 of the entire world's population watches micro drama. Omdia, which is a research company, estimates the industry generated about 11 billion US globally in 2025. and it's expected to more than double by 2030 to 26 billion US. Yangyang is a producer on this show and is based in Hong Kong. Lately, she's been reporting on the micro drama Boom, as has Bloomberg Business Week's Christopher Beam. There's been a lot of adoption around the world.

As you can imagine, there are companies trying to present micro dramas as the next wave of telas. So it is a global phenomenon with differences in various regions.

Chris and Young say recently it seems like microdramas are everywhere on hundreds of dedicated apps worldwide in marketing and promotional content from brands like Crocs and Maybelline. Even on the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon and John Stamos.

Why? Why would you do this? I I've never even met you.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We've met before, but I'm sure you don't remember a lowly caddy at your precious country club.

But as micro dramas surge into the mainstream, the industry is grappling with a disruptive force that could reshape its future. You have AI cutting cost and making the business model more efficient and more scalable. On the other hand, you have the human cost and displacement. also a lot of repetitive content made by AI. The real question isn't is AI good or bad for the industry, but rather who benefits from AI's impact and who's left out.

This is the Big Tech Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Juan Ha. Every week we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons, and businesses that drive this evershifting region. Today in the show, micro dramas, how a Chinese entertainment phenomenon became a global obsession, whether it can sustain interest, and how AI is reshaping the industry. A microdrama series can run anywhere between 50 to 90 episodes in total.

But because each episode only lasts a few minutes, you can binge watch the entire thing in about an hour. And if you're on social media, chances are you've already scrolled past one. Tik Tok started showing me these little like snippets of what appeared to be a TV show. Is anybody else obsessed with those like mini K dramas that be on Tik Tok now? I mean, some of them are really some of them I do be really into like this.

Bloomberg's Young says that's usually how it starts. A few episodes show up as ads on your Instagram and Tik Tok feeds. They're super compelling, short, and packed with lots of plot twists, emotional beats, and cliffhers.

It's coined as dopamine storytelling. The point is to lure you to these individual micro drama apps. That's where you're going to pay with your money or with your attention to watch ad to finish watching these micro drama episodes. These bite-sized episodes served up over social media are bait for a bigger business opportunity. To continue watching the rest of the series, viewers often are pushed to download dedicated apps.

Some charge a subscription fee while others let you watch for free as long as you're willing to sit through ads.

Micro drama is surging. We see the downloads globally in the first quarter of this year up 140% yearonear. So in early 2026, the US alone drove nearly 40% of global inapp purchase for micro drama, which is the largest single market um outside of China. And where we see these exponential growth are the markets like Southeast Asia, South Asia, like India and Latin America. Like many of the apps themselves, the microdrama format started in China in the late 2010s.

Production companies began packaging popular web novels into short serialized videos designed to be watched on a commute or a work break. Imagine you're on the pack train after a long day of work or you are between your shifts and you only have 10 minutes of break time. You don't have the time and mental capacity to watch something like the Odyssey. You just want something fast and entertaining and bridge you through this break time.

The pandemic supercharged the trend. People were spending more time on their phones and thanks to social media apps like Do Yin, China's version of Tik Tok, people were already used to watching short vertical content. When Do Yin saw how viral some popular micro dramas were becoming, it started working with production studios to put them on its platform. In the initial days in China, micro drama got so popular partially because it was enabled to infiltrate platforms like Doí and Doí would distribute content from microdrama companies and they would target it directly to people who they already know enjoy these short, snappy, dramatic content.

The numbers were staggering. Last year, nearly 700 million people in China, about half of the country's population, were watching micro dramas. And the industry generated more revenue than China's entire movie box office two years in a row. But that market hit a wall. The predominant audience is female, about 18 to 45 age range. So, it's it's a very specific kind of pool. As the domestic market became more crowded, Chinese production companies started looking overseas and they produced thousands of new titles aimed at international audiences.

By early last year, more than 200 microdrama apps had launched outside of China. That's nearly four times the number from the previous year. Globally, the average daily time spent on micro drama apps, it rose to 25 minutes by April 2026. That's about 85% up from last year, last January.

And this is according to Sensor Tower um and industry research firms. How does that compare to like streaming Netflix or anything else that you might be watching?

That is closing in on your traditional uh streaming platforms which has stayed roughly flat compared to micro drama and I think that's number on that is about 35 minutes per d