Micro dramas are booming outside the US. They’re beginning to see traction stateside too, with lots of startups trying to convince American consumers to pay a few dollars to watch soapy stories on their phones.
But right now, there’s one clear winner in the US micro drama industry: Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg’s Meta is by far the most popular place for micro drama producers to market their stuff, industry players tell us. Some estimate that startups are directing up to 75% of their marketing budgets to Meta’s various properties, in the hopes of getting Facebook or Reels users to come to their sites.
“What I hear consistently from apps is, Meta gets more than half of the customer acquisition spend by most micro drama apps,” said Hernan Lopez, founder of research firm Owl & Co. He pegs micro drama ad spending at $1.5 billion globally — excluding China, where the genre started.
But Meta isn’t just harvesting ad dollars from the micro drama business. It’s also getting tons of free content: Micro dramas advertise themselves by showing users multiple episodes of their shows for free — and sometimes they’ll show them many, many episodes. Some micro drama producers, including ReelShort, Flareflow, and ShortMax, have uploaded clips as long as 20 minutes to Meta’s ad hub.
So Meta gets the best of both worlds: Micro drama producers give them money and they give Meta engaging videos that keep their audiences on Meta’s properties.
Meta declined to comment.
GammaTime, a year-old micro drama company, spends some 55% of its marketing budget on Meta, said cofounder Slava Mudryk. Very long ads are part of the mix when GammaTime launches a series or has a series with a particularly strong story arc within the series, he said.
Mudrykh said these long ads give Meta an advantage over TikTok and YouTube, which don’t offer them.
“We always use it with launches,” he said. “What we see is that this long sequence just brings people in to watch. And when it’s done, the desire to continue watching on the app is strong.”
You’d expect that TikTok, which exists solely to show users short clips and whose Chinese roots have made it very familiar with micro dramas, would be a big player in micro drama ads. But people in the industry say Meta’s ad infrastructure and targeting abilities make it easier to find viewers and convert them into paying customers.
It also helps that Facebook’s aging user base is more likely able and willing to spend money on apps, says Ali Albazaz, whose Inkitt startup runs micro drama app Candy Jar.
“If the story is enticing enough, and grabs the user’s attention, that person who comes to our app has a very high likelihood of converting to a paid user.”
But that also seems like it will set up a long-term tension between Meta and its new breed of customers: If micro drama players are able to get real traction, that means they’ll eventually be pulling eyeballs away from Meta. It’s also not a new tension for Meta: A few years ago, when TikTok was entering the market, Meta made billions selling ads promoting the app to its users — and now TikTok is a giant competitor.
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