Guide · The format

What is a micro drama?

"Micro drama" is the industry name for the vertical, minute-long-episode mini-series that blew up out of China and now fills apps like ReelShort and DramaBox. Same format you'll also see called a short drama or a vertical drama — 77,691 of them are indexed here across 24 apps.

Last reviewed Nov 2026

What makes a drama 'micro'

The 'micro' is the episode length. Instead of 40-minute TV episodes or even 10-minute web-series ones, a micro drama's episodes run 60 to 120 seconds. The trade-off is volume: a single story is told across 60–100 of those micro-episodes, so the series as a whole is substantial even though each piece is tiny.

That structure is deliberate. A one-minute episode that ends on a cliffhanger is the most efficient possible machine for 'just one more' — which is exactly how a 90-episode drama gets binged in an afternoon.

Micro drama vs web series vs short film

A web series is usually horizontal and runs 5–20 minutes an episode. A short film is a single self-contained 5–40 minute story. A micro drama is neither: it's vertical, its episodes are under two minutes, and it's a long serialized story chopped into many tiny cliffhanger-ended pieces.

If it's vertical, the episodes are about a minute, and there are dozens of them, it's a micro drama — whatever the app calls it.

Why the format took over

Micro dramas are cheap and fast to produce, perfectly sized for phone viewing and ad breaks, and their freemium model (free opening episodes, paid tail) converts casual viewers into payers one cliffhanger at a time. That combination made them one of the fastest-growing corners of mobile entertainment.

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