The new fever in China is mobile series with one-minute episodes. And they prepare their landing outside Asia

Who was going to tell us that Quibithat app that around here we welcomed with joy and which presented series divided into short chapters designed to be consumed vertically or horizontally but always operated from the mobile phone, had been visionary. That Jeffrey Katzenberg invention ended up being a fiasco and a waste of money, but perhaps what really happened to him is that he arrived too soon. Or perhaps that can be inferred from the latest fad in the Chinese market that may end up leaving the Asian market soon: microdramas.

What does it consist of? These are small fictions, often with romantic content (but, also in Korean style, sometimes with fantastic elements such as vampires in love or time travel), created for mobile consumption (that is, in vertical format) on platforms. that facilitate quick passage from one episode to another, such as TikTok or YouTube (but also in others less known outside Asia, such as Kuaishou, Douyin or Bilibili), and whose episodes last around one or two minutes. Each series contains between 60 and 100 episodes, meaning the total duration of each series is approximately equivalent to that of a movie.

The income. We are not talking about a precisely small market. In 2024 this digital subgenre generated 2,000 million dollars, an amount that could double in 2025. According to Chinese media, we could be talking about 2023 gross revenue of $5.2 billion per yearwhich is equivalent to 70% of China’s film market, one of the most important in the world. An example of the numbers that these series manage: one of the most popular, ‘Unparalleled’ may have earned 14 million dollars in just eight days of broadcast. And not only because of the high price of subscriptions to viewing platforms: their viewers are counted in hundreds of millions and there are already brands of cosmetic products with which they establish themselves juicy sponsorships.

The secret to such enormous success? Variety, for example, point that if the time of confinement favored the explosion of health services streaming domestic because there was no choice but to be at home, when viewers have gone out again and used public transport, it is the mobile content apps that have skyrocketed their number of users. Behind this content there are mainly two names: on the one hand, Kuiashou, a platform dedicated to short videos that previously fed, like TikTok, on content mainly created by users (and that was the first to adopt the term “microdrama”); and on the other, Douyin, owned by Bytedance, also owner of TikTok.

Leap out of Asia. All of this would remain just another format that is only consumed in China if it were not for the fact that microdramas are beginning to expand beyond the borders of the Asian country. In East and Southeast Asia it is beginning to be common and the company Reelshort (behind which is the giant Tencent and Baidu) want to bring microdramas to the United States, where they are starting to gain traction. The stores of Apple and Google apps, with wide penetration outside Asia, have seen applications intended for this type of content downloaded thirty million times in the first quarter of 2024so the foundations are well established.

A look at Reelshort. A quick visit to Reelshort It will make it very clear to us what type of content we are talking about. They are series that westernize the Chinese product, as revealed by those titles with an undeniable oriental soap opera flavor: ‘In Love with the Alpha’, ‘The Billionaire’s Contract’ or ‘Fatal Attraction: Mafioso Romance’. All of them are translated and subtitled using AI, and some of them are dubbed with an unmistakable neutral accent, which also gives some clue as to what type of audience the app is aimed at: regular consumers of Latin American soap operas.

The relationship with video games. And there is something else: the deep relationship of these products with video games, which starts with the gamification with which many of these programs are presented. Completing tasks such as watching the series gives access to the currency used by each app (which can also be purchased with real money), which allows you to unlock the episodes of the series that are blocked (the “taste” of the five or ten first episodes of each series is free, to hook the viewer). It is not surprising that some of the companies that own these apps (Crazy Maple Studio, owner of Reelshort, for example) are dedicated to the development of mobile games.

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