As Western studios circle vertical drama, one of China’s biggest micro drama companies has opened the books. The numbers describe an economic machine television cannot currently match, and a race to own the IP that will power it.
From Rags to Rank 1 is a time-travelling historical drama produced by COL Group, and its performance explains why micro drama has become the content industry’s most closely watched growth story. The series was made for around a quarter of a million dollars. Within a week it had a billion views, and audiences were already demanding a second season. “It took us two months to confirm that we’re going to go ahead with the second season, because we saw the reception,” says Timothy Yeoh, who leads international expansion at COL Group. “Within two and a half months we basically released the next series. If today we were a regular TV network, it would take maybe another year or two.”
The revenue side is just as startling. A typical series costs $150,000 to $200,000 to produce. “A good show would actually bring in 19, 20 million dollars within two weeks, if it’s well marketed,” Yeoh says, before adding the qualification that matters: that figure excludes marketing costs, which even things out considerably. Understanding why is the key to understanding the entire business.
Marketing is the distribution system
In micro drama, marketing is not a launch campaign. It is the distribution system itself, and it routinely costs more than the show. “You could spend up to more than a million on a particular show,” Yeoh says. The reason is that discovery works nothing like television. “You don’t see press tours, you don’t see trailers dropping before the series happens. We’re putting the first few episodes on your Instagram or your TikTok, get you hooked, so that you would download the app to finish watching it. It’s very much using the story to attract you.”
Behind that funnel sits an industrial testing operation. A show goes up for two or three days, performance is analysed, and the episodes are re-edited if the hooks are not landing. Thousands of versions of trailers and episodes go out on social media to identify who is watching and, more importantly, who is paying. “We run approximately 400 experiments each month to make sure that the show gets to the right person,” Yeoh says. AI does some of the work, supported by a team operating around the clock.
The same data drives commissioning. When COL released 99 Forgiveness in the US, a simple story about a boxer who becomes a champion and ditches his girlfriend, the audience analytics revealed exactly who was watching, where they lived and what their hobbies were. Within two months COL had commissioned 99 Chances, in which a singer signed by a record label ditches his girlfriend, who then becomes a star herself. “We use the data to decide what is the next version,” Yeoh says. “It’s more similar to how a TikToker or an Instagrammer decides content. You see someone do a silly dance, and the next moment you do the silly dance again and you improve it.”
An IP company running multiple horses
COL’s route into the format explains its confidence. The company started 25 years ago as an incubator of IP, collecting stories from writers and delivering eBook chapters to subscribers through telco messaging. It is now, Yeoh says, the second largest IP company in China. Micro drama is simply that library’s visual evolution. “Short films have existed for the longest time, and we never knew how to monetise them,” he says. “Micro drama is an evolution of that.”
The corporate structure reflects a market too young for a single strategy. COL launched the first app in China’s micro drama ecosystem, became a leading content producer for ByteDance’s Hongguo platform, and incubated Crazy Maple Studio, the company behind ReelShort. It has since launched UniReel, Zero Plus and FlareFlow, one of the fastest growing platforms in the US. The apps largely carry the same content for the same audiences. “Having one method or one go-to-market strategy for one app isn’t viable enough,” Yeoh explains. “We’ve been going on this micro drama race and putting a lot of horses out there.”
Why re-cutting television fails
For rights holders, the tempting shortcut is the edit suite. Yeoh’s warning is unambiguous: re-versioned TV cannot deliver the hook the format demands every 90 seconds, and free recap edits already circulating on Instagram have stripped any value from cut-downs. The deeper constraint is structural. “Every episode is just two minutes. You can’t tell four storylines with six subplots, because by the time you get to the eighth episode you have to go back to the first character. Most of the time you have a character you’re rooting for, and you’re following that character’s journey.”
His reference point is gaming, where he spent part of his career. Big console IPs such as Mario were not ported to mobile; they were rebuilt for it, in a more accessible form that let far more people play. “It’s really expanding the IPs so that more people could experience it, with shorter attention span and shorter investment in time,” he says. Writing an original show that earns a payment every two minutes is genuinely hard, which is why he believes established IP is the format’s real unlock. “The magic in this whole process is how do you take an existing IP that you own and a successful formula, and find that balance and synergy.”
COL is now testing that thesis at scale. With Refinery Media it is taking Supermodel Me, a reality format that ran for six seasons and appeared on Netflix and ITV, and shooting it purely vertically. “We’re not even discussing a horizontal series,” Yeoh says. “It would signal the first for many other big IPs to come on this bandwagon. After I announced it, I’ve got many calls saying, can we do this and do it vertically too?”
The UK problem is an ecosystem problem
Yeoh is candid about why the format has not yet cracked Britain. The dominant register, which he compares to Mills and Boon, sits awkwardly with local taste. “The British love dry, deadpan humour, which you don’t really get in the micro drama,” he says, agreeing that much of the current output is cheesy. His prescription is native content married to the big, nostalgic IP that British audiences follow religiously, the storytelling of soaps reimagined mobile-first.
The harder barrier is structural. “It really has to come from someone that wants to drive an ecosystem,” he says. “It doesn’t work if someone is going to produce two or three shows. Where do they put them? Where do they monetise it? You can get the views, but then nobody’s going to pay for it.” UK producers, he reports from a round of London meetings, are curious but hesitant: “Everybody’s curious, but nobody really wants to take the first step.”
Elsewhere the map is filling in fast. Growth is strongest in mobile-first markets historically priced out of pay TV, including Southeast Asia, Brazil and Japan. Germany is a surprise top-five market, francophone Africa is emerging, and Yeoh says unnamed European broadcasters and streamers are in serious talks to move first.
A two-year race for returnable IP
Yeoh’s two-year outlook starts with TikTok, which he expects to become a dominant force, since swiping from a dance video into a micro drama is a far shorter journey than luring a Netflix subscriber. Around it he predicts regional apps built on locally owned IP, a survival-of-the-fittest shakeout among existing platforms, e-commerce integration and a wave of subtle branded content, noting that P&G has already invested in its own micro drama. Soap operas were funded by soap powder in the 1950s; the format may be heading full circle.
The decisive contest, though, is for IP that lasts. “If you were to remove the logos from the shows, you can’t tell who it’s from,” he says of today’s interchangeable output. “It’s going to be a race of who is going to create the major IP that people will come back for.” For television executives, the honest caveat is that outside China the paying audience is still unproven; viewership is established, sustainable monetisation is not. But the lesson of the numbers is hard to ignore. A business that commissions in months, markets with 400 experiments a month and rebuilds proven formats natively for the phone is not a fad to be waited out. It is a competitor operating at a speed television has never had to match.
