From “Spiritual White Label” to Global Blockbuster: The Evolutionary Path of Short Dramas Going Global

Author | Li Xiaotian

In contract marriages and the trope of falling in love after marriage, the male lead evolves from being initially "disdainful" to "hopelessly infatuated," while the female lead progresses from "passively enduring" to "standing on her own feet." Add to this the scheming of the vicious female supporting character and the devious plots of business rivals. These familiar elements and standard formulas, which seem outdated to domestic audiences, are now extremely popular among some audiences in Europe, America, Japan, and South Korea.

Although often criticized for having a single theme and homogeneous content, there is no denying that the overseas expansion of short dramas is still a promising field. Data from Sensor Tower shows that in the first quarter of 2025, the in-app revenue of global short drama applications reached approximately $700 million, nearly four times that of the first quarter of 2024. The global downloads exceeded 370 million, a year-on-year increase of 6.2 times. Among them, pioneers such as ReelShort and DramaBox continue to lead the market, while a wave of emerging players launched in the second half of 2024 - including DramaWave, NetShort, and FlickReels - have experienced rapid growth.

However, this field is far from reaching its ceiling. He Zexi, co-founder and COO of ShortMax, told Xiaguang She, "Compared with the domestic market, where the penetration rate of short dramas has reached as high as 60%, globally, the penetration rate is only between 5% and 10%. In terms of user scale penetration, there is still a lot of room for growth." The "2024 Research Report on China's Micro Short Drama Industry" shows that the market scale of China's micro short dramas reached 50.5 billion yuan in 2024. Many short drama practitioners believe that the overseas market scale will eventually be several times that of the domestic market, with great prospects for the future.

But behind the impressive data, the problems of the overseas expansion of short dramas are becoming increasingly apparent: the homogenization of themes has led to rampant plagiarism, and the leading platform ReelShort is also deeply involved in the controversy of "systematic plagiarism"; the content bottleneck has led to a bottleneck in user growth, and the high cost of advertising has made almost all platforms "spend money for popularity"; within the single "domineering president" theme, "involution" has become the norm, and many small platforms have been eliminated in advance.

In response, Saber_Z, the creative director of WoJu Culture, which focuses on the North American short drama market, told Xiaguang She, "The overseas short drama market is still in a very early and booming stage. Different platforms are in a period of competing for users. Only by binding the user volume to a platform, increasing its user stickiness and downloads, can there be more potential revenue."

Xin Yue, the former overseas editor-in-chief of Stardust TV, believes that "the overseas expansion of short dramas is completely a money-burning business. Many companies enter this business with a try-and-see attitude, thinking that there is room for development in this field in the future, so they want to occupy a place first. Secondly, many platforms are also creating an illusion of false prosperity. They don't rely on creating hit dramas to make a profit, but to tell a good story to the capital."

01 It's Not Conquest, It's Filling: The Truth Behind the Overseas Expansion of Chinese Short Dramas

The popularity of the overseas expansion of short dramas may subvert some of our established imaginations about European and American movies and TV shows.

In our inherent impression, the European and American film and television industries have high-end industrialization standards, technological barriers, global narrative abilities, and cultural output capabilities. The well-known Hollywood blockbusters and Netflix series such as "House of Cards," "Narcos," and "Stranger Things" have all exerted an unparalleled global influence and appeal, becoming the cinematic imprints of a generation.

Therefore, against this backdrop, for a while, the sensational narrative of "Chinese short dramas conquering Europe and America" has triggered a frenzy of nationalistic emotions. Even the non-existent short drama "Trump Falls in Love with Me, a Cleaner in the White House" has caused a collective excitement among marketing accounts. However, it should be noted that Chinese short dramas are just a niche segment in the global content consumption market. There are indeed audiences for short dramas overseas because the viewing needs of some European and American audiences have never been met.

The most widely circulated real-life footage actually comes from a variety show called "Saturday Night Live" produced by the American NBC TV station.

In fact, the Netflix-style movies and TV shows we are familiar with, such as crime, suspense, dark, and reasoning dramas, do not represent the aesthetic tastes of all European and American users. Instead, they more represent the content consumption demands of the middle class. For others, these works have a certain "elite threshold" - one needs to have the text interpretation ability shaped by the modern education system to truly understand and appreciate them; for themselves, they are also "popular and friendly" enough - the excitement of crime plots and the pleasure of intellectual games can just meet the needs of daily entertainment.

But what do the vast sinking markets in Europe and America watch? In the era of mobile Internet, the small screens in everyone's hands have replaced the large screens that once united people. The individualization of content consumption and aesthetic tastes has become particularly important. Even the most silent consumer groups can be keenly captured by capital, and cultural products tailored to them can be created. Chinese short dramas have filled this gap.

In a sense, the overseas expansion of Chinese short dramas is like the overseas expansion of white-label small commodities on a spiritual level: Both rely on the advantages of a complete industrial chain and can achieve high-efficiency mass production at a relatively low cost; both are driven by a large domestic consumer population with diverse demands, which promotes the segmentation and innovation of products and accumulates a large number of SKUs that can meet the needs of global consumers; both use large-scale advertising and invest high marketing expenses every month to quickly increase their popularity; even the age structure of the user profiles is surprisingly consistent - Temu has an important position among millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) in Europe and the United States, and is particularly popular among American, black, and Asian consumers; while the users of overseas short dramas in North America are concentrated above 25 years old, among which users over 35 years old account for more than 50%, and white women over 45 years old are the main paying group, accounting for 48%.

In response, Zhang Zihan, a director who has created and launched several short drama works in the North American market, told Xiaguang She that in North America, the main audience of short dramas are housewives around 40 - 60 years old, as well as Mexican and Latin American women. "Short dramas have a certain influence in North America, but it is only limited to a certain group. Works on American streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu are too refined and artistic for this group. Although TikTok provides some vertical-screen, real-life content, there is no plot that meets the fantasies of some viewers. And short dramas, as functional products, provide emotional value and a channel to relieve life stress for this group, so they naturally become a good cultural product."

Xin Yue, the former overseas editor-in-chief of Stardust TV, told Xiaguang She, "Short dramas in North America are far from being widely appreciated by the whole population. They have only penetrated a small number of users in the North American market. Their scale cannot be compared with that of long drama audiences, and they cannot be said to have become a mainstream platform. Among North American short drama users, although the payment performance of white people is quite可观, there are also many Chinese and Latin American users."

Malik Naibi of the social media marketing agency Duke 65 said that most of the short drama audiences in China are blue-collar workers, and they often end up spending the equivalent of a movie ticket to watch a whole drama. ReelShort has brought this concept and some storylines to its target audience in the United States: middle-aged women.

02 Overseas Short Dramas Are Trapped in the Domineering President Trope

For the global content consumption group mainly composed of middle-aged women, the most popular short drama theme is the "domineering president."

Compared with domestic short dramas, which have evolved into a rich and diverse range of themes, from domineering president romances, rebirth and revenge, time-traveling palace intrigues, to female empowerment, workplace sweet romances, and family dramas, the themes of overseas short dramas are extremely single and scarce.

Flocking to the domineering president theme is naturally a rational choice for short drama platforms to avoid risks and maximize profits. For this group of female audiences who lack emotional experiences and are conservative and repressed, the ever-changing domineering president short dramas can provide endless spiritual comfort.

As stated in the cultural research work "Reading Romance Novels," which studies the phenomenon of white middle-class housewives in the United States in the second half of the 20th century being obsessed with domineering president romance novels: "Reading romance novels compensates women in two different ways. By triggering the reader's identification with a fictional female protagonist (whose female identity is always confirmed through the love and sexual attention of an ideal man), it provides alternative emotional care; the second compensatory meaning of romance novels is that it fills the female's spiritual world with the details of virtual travel, allowing her to have imaginary conversations with adults in a broader social space."

Comments from readers under a report in the American magazine "Wired" about the popularity of Chinese short dramas in North America.

In the era of mobile Internet, cultural products targeting them also need to adapt to the changes in media forms. Chinese short drama platforms have taken advantage of this trend to expand overseas, replacing romance novels and soap operas with vertical-screen short dramas to continuously meet their emotional needs and self-recognition.

However, an overly single theme type will inevitably lead to a lack of freshness and weak user growth.

What many platforms are doing now is to engage in in-depth involution within the domineering president theme. For example, they add werewolf elements familiar to European and American audiences, or combine tropes such as rebirth and revenge with the domineering president theme for type nesting experiments. Localization of the plot content is an important task. For example, reducing plot elements with obvious East Asian narratives such as "original family" and "son preference," but too many changes may also destroy the original popular factors of the drama. Ultimately, this is not an industry that encourages innovation, unless you can prove that innovation brings actual revenue.

The popularity of werewolf stories in the European and American world stems from the vigorous sexual liberation movement in Europe and America in the 1960s and 1970s. The legacy of this movement - respect for individual autonomy and diverse sexual orientations - has profoundly shaped the modern European and American society's sexual concepts and gender culture. When class barriers, traditional concepts, and secular prejudices no longer hinder love, then "species difference" becomes a new obstacle. People shed tears again for the "myth of love" in the struggle to cross the barriers. It can be said that werewolves are the domineering president romances with European and American regional characteristics.

In Xin Yue's view, the single theme of overseas short dramas is also closely related to the unfamiliarity and estrangement of short drama creation teams with overseas hot news and social culture.

For example, many domestic short dramas are adapted from hot news such as wife-killing for insurance fraud, transnational telecom fraud, sky-high bride prices, and nanny abuse of the elderly, which directly hit the pain points of users. Once these topics are mentioned, they will trigger passionate discussions. However, because overseas short drama platforms do not know much about the North American market, they are unable to create such "synchronous" themes and cannot clearly identify the emotional trigger points of overseas audiences. Therefore, their creation is naturally limited to the evergreen domineering president theme.

The short drama "Breaking the ice" on ReelShort

Xin Yue gave an example. She believes that the issue of "racial discrimination" is a good topic and emotional trigger for creating short dramas about counterattack and revenge. However, racial issues are a taboo in North American creation. "North American audiences are very sensitive to this topic. I have a drama where the male lead is a big star, and the actor playing his agent is a black person. It wasn't intentional; it just so happened that this black actor was available. After the drama was launched, there were comments questioning why a black person was chosen to play his agent. Did they think that black people must serve white people?"

Saber_Z, the creative director of WoJu Culture, also believes that the lack of screenwriting talent is the biggest bottleneck faced by current overseas short drama creation teams. "Some overseas students majoring in film and television actively participate in overseas social activities and communicate with locals, and they may have the potential to become the screenwriters we need. However, many overseas students mostly hang out with Chinese people or are quite introverted. They hardly speak any English and know very little about local culture. Their overseas life experience is almost non-existent. There are too few screenwriters who can really create works that hit the sweet spots of overseas audiences."

On the other hand, Chinese short dramas are derived from more than twenty years of online literature and have developed into various types such as fantasy, time-traveling, and alternative history. Many online literature works have changed from niche interests to popular culture through film and television adaptations. Chinese audiences have been more or less influenced by these works and can smoothly enter the worldviews set up by short dramas.

The term "setting" originated in the Japanese anime field and its connotation has been extended after being introduced into online literature. It refers to constructing a suitable background environment, character images, and story details based on the core plot and creative intention of a story, thus forming a self-consistent fictional world. Readers will naturally accept these settings during the reading process and use them as a basis to understand and interpret the whole story.

However, for overseas audiences, plot settings such as "system," "strategy," and "time-traveling" have a certain threshold for understanding. When creating short dramas with these concepts, the creation team needs to first explain the meaning of these settings to the audience through foreshadowing. However, educating the market requires a certain amount of time and cost, and it may not be possible to quickly form a stable and mature plot type. Most short drama companies that want to make quick money do not have the patience to educate the market and cultivate audiences.

"Some platforms have previously tried short dramas about soul possession, rebirth, or period dramas like 'Being a Stepmother in the 1980s,' but the data performance was not good. The issue of the audience's understanding cost is an important factor affecting the data performance," Xin Yue said.

In Xin Yue's view, the pay-per-episode mechanism of overseas short drama platforms is also not suitable for the daily payment habits of North American consumers. Long-video platforms such as Netflix adopt a subscription model, where users can unlock all the dramas on the platform by paying a monthly or quarterly fee. However, most overseas short drama platforms still use the single-episode unlocking payment model. "We have seen many messages in the app background. Many audience comments mention that they find the process of watching dramas very annoying. Why are they always asked to pay?"

03 It's Not Just for Women: Overseas Short Dramas Target the Global "Emotional Necessities"

However, there is still room for exploration in other story types.

Recently, in many markets such as Europe, America, and Japan, a type of short drama called the "regret genre" has performed well. The so-called "regret genre" refers to short dramas where the female lead enters a cryogenic chamber or is reborn after death after being misunderstood by her lover or family, while her lover and family regret deeply in endless memories, and the person is gone and the past is over; or the female lead comes back to life while the male lead has become old. Representative short dramas of this genre include "After My Long Sleep, My Three Brothers Turned Gray for Me" and "Unforgettable for Life."

Xue Jing, a scholar from the School of Humanities at Tsinghua University, believes that the pleasure point of this narrative mode, which is similar to the "chasing the wife in the crematorium" trope, lies in the fact that women find an outlet for their hurt emotions and write an ending for themselves. Through imaginary self-relief and self-satisfaction, women's sacrifices in love relationships are rewarded. For older female audiences, this narrative promises that all the uncomfortable experiences in their current emotional and marriage relationships will ultimately be rewarded in a better way. Some short drama audiences consume short dramas as a "painkiller" in their daily lives.

In addition to the "regret genre," some "silver-haired themed" short dramas tailored for overseas middle-aged and elderly groups have also achieved good results. The short drama app FlickReels under Hangzhou Zhangwan Network, which was launched in July 2024 and focuses on the theme of "sweet romances for middle-aged and elderly people," has emerged as a dark horse in overseas expansion. So far, its downloads have exceeded 10 million, and its cumulative revenue has exceeded 200 million yuan, confirming the strong demand for short drama content and payment ability of the overseas silver-haired group.

In fact, in China, short drama producers have turned their attention to elderly audiences since last year. According to the 2024 report on China's ultra-short drama industry by iResearch, currently 37.3% of ultra-short drama audiences are between 40 and 59 years old. Data from QuestMobile also shows that in March 2024, nearly 40% of the users of leading short-video apps were over 45 years old, and nearly half of them spent between 1,000 and 1,999 yuan per month.

For silver-haired themed short dramas, the mainstream approach of various platforms now is to localize the silver-haired themed short dramas with good data performance in China and then find local actors overseas to shoot them. Representative works include "Falling in Love at 50" and "Shining Grandmas." Some production crews also bring foreign actors to China to shoot in mature domestic film and television bases to save costs.

In Japan, another key market for the overseas expansion of short dramas, the middle-aged and elderly group also has great potential. As is well known, Japanese society is facing serious aging problems. On the one hand, due to the economic pressure of "bankruptcy in old age," the elderly who should be enjoying their retirement are forced to return to the workplace; on the other hand, there are also many full-time housewives with considerable consumption ability. The popularity of relevant short dramas also confirms this. According to the overseas short drama hot list data of DataEye, during the week from March 3rd to March 9th, 2025, the two short dramas that topped the Japanese market were both translated Chinese silver-haired themed dramas, namely "A Man in His Fifties" and "Falling in Love at Fifty," which catered to the real emotional needs of Japanese elderly people for workplace counterattacks and love affairs.

In response, Wang Xiaoxi, the director of Ekflash JP, which focuses on the Japanese short drama market, told Xiaguang She that currently the Japanese short drama market is mainly dominated by short dramas about rich young ladies' counterattacks. All platforms are approaching the Japanese market in a piecemeal way. There are too few self-produced and real-shot dramas in Japan, and they are far from being competitive. "In terms of development potential, the Japanese have very good payment habits, and there is almost no piracy of movies and TV shows. However, in Japan, one must operate in the long term and gradually cultivate the local audience's viewing habits," Wang Xiaoxi said.

In addition to short dramas for female audiences, short dramas for male audiences overseas are also in the exploration stage.

In response, Xin Yue shared with Xiaguang She that the proportion of male audiences in North America is increasing. The core underlying logic of North American male-oriented short dramas is the same as that of Chinese short dramas about useless sons-in-law and invincible heroes. However, North American short dramas will adopt more acceptable narrative shells such as prison breaks for localization.

How far can the overseas expansion of short dramas, which is trying to explore diversified themes, go? In the best-selling book "Hooked" in Silicon Valley, it is mentioned that in today's era, product sales compete in terms of how to occupy the minds of consumers. The product itself is the best marketing. A product that touches the emotions of users occupies the user's mind. A product not only meets functional needs but also reflects human nature. A product becomes a blend of technology and humanity, so a good product must be based on profound artistic taste and psychological principles. When a product enters the user's habit zone, it will gain sustainable vitality.

In today's era when emotional consumption has become a necessity, Chinese short dramas are trying to become a global product that touches the emotions of users around the world. Xiaguang She will also continue to follow the latest developments in the overseas expansion of short dramas.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Xiaguang She." Author: Li Xiaotian. Republished with permission from Qiantang.