Vertical micro-drama: which Vietnamese brands should try it
In Q1 2025, viewers worldwide spent about $700 million in short-drama apps, nearly four times the same quarter a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower. Most of that money went to paying for the next episode of vertical-frame series, a few minutes each, ending just as the heroine is about to expose the villain.
That is micro-drama: multi-episode short series shot in vertical format, made for the phone screen. If you know old newspaper serials, the logic is familiar. One installment at a time, stopped at the most tense moment, continued next issue. Now "next issue" is one swipe and one payment away.
With numbers growing this fast, many marketers are asking whether their brand should make a series. 126Insights' view: most Vietnamese brands should stay out, a small group should try, and that group should test on free platforms with a stop rule written before shooting begins.
A big market, but where the money goes
Growth has not stopped. Sensor Tower also puts Q1 2026 in-app revenue across short-drama apps at about $750 million, with DramaBox and ReelShort each close to $140 million (summarized by Powerdrill). Large entertainment companies are paying attention: Netflix added a vertical video feed on mobile in 2025, and in July 2025 DramaBox was selected for the Disney Accelerator program (Wikipedia).
Two details should slow a marketer down before any budget moves.
First, estimates of market size differ wildly. Omdia puts global micro-drama revenue in 2025 at $11 billion (Powerdrill). Deloitte's figure for in-app revenue the same year is $3.8 billion (Digital Yield Group). That is a gap of nearly three times. When a production house opens its deck with "a market worth tens of billions," ask where the number comes from and what it measures: only what viewers pay inside apps, or advertising as well.
Second, running a short-drama app does not guarantee profit. According to third-party estimates compiled by Vitrina, DramaBox took in $323 million in 2024 with $10 million in net profit, while ReelShort earned around $400 million but still lost money because of heavy marketing spend. Media Partners Asia projects ReelShort will earn about $40 million in 2026, after a loss of about $12 million in 2025 (Streaming Radar). That is still a projection. Even the leading app has to burn a lot of cash to bring viewers in.
What brands should remember: the revenue figures above are mostly money viewers pay to watch the next episode, and none of them measures results for an advertiser. If someone sells you a micro-drama series with firm promises about brand recall or conversion, ask for data from a real campaign, with a named brand and a run dates.
Photo: kbk8196 on Pixabay
Who is on the other side of the screen
Figures cited by Digital Yield Group put ReelShort at about 45 million monthly active users, 70% of them women, with US users watching an average of 35.7 minutes a day (Digital Yield Group). The US is the largest market outside China, estimated at about $1.3 billion in 2025 (Wikipedia). In short: the people paying for micro-drama today are mostly women, and many of them are in the US.
These apps make money by selling coins: viewers top up and spend coins to open each episode. Whether Vietnamese viewers will pay per episode is still an open question. If you use ReelShort's success in the US as the reason to make a series in Vietnam, you are mixing two markets that differ in audience, in spending habits and in taste for content.
So if a Vietnamese brand tries this, it should publish directly on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Viewers there pay nothing to keep watching, Vietnamese audiences already use these platforms daily, and the brand posts on its own channel.
Who should try it
The 126Insights test is narrow: the product must have a natural place in a story with emotional conflict. Fashion, food and beverage, cosmetics, e-wallets and fintech pass most easily, because they already appear in a character's everyday life.
Suppose a bubble tea chain in Ho Chi Minh City makes a 10-episode series about two night-shift employees, one about to quit and go back to her home village, the other too shy to say he likes her. The shop is the setting and the milk tea is a prop. If viewers remember the brand, it is because they spent 10 episodes sitting in that shop. The camera never has to point at the logo.
Another hypothetical: an e-wallet app makes a series about friends who come back from a trip to Da Lat, a highland resort town, and fall out over a 200,000 VND (about $8) debt nobody has paid. The bill-splitting feature sits inside the conflict itself. Viewers see what the product does without a single line of ad dialogue.
Both examples share one trait: take the product out and the story loses a piece. That is the simplest test. A series of 8 to 12 episodes is enough to learn whether an audience will follow, without committing to a full multi-season run.
Who should stay out
B2B brands, products that need long explanations such as enterprise software or insurance with many clauses, and brands without the budget for a well-made series should skip micro-drama, at least for now.
The first reason is pacing. Micro-drama runs on dense emotion and a hook at the end of each episode. A product that needs three minutes of explanation stalls the story, and viewers swipe away at that second.
The second is money. A rushed series with a generic script and the product wedged into every scene is really just an ad that is longer than usual and cut into pieces. The same budget put into a channel that already works may return more.
The third is image. Micro-drama draws audiences with reveals, shouting matches and secrets exposed at the end of an episode. A brand with a calm, professional image will struggle to sit beside that kind of content without looking off-tone.
Vietnamese has a saying: "Seeing others eat sweet potatoes, you grab a hoe and go digging." It mocks people who copy a trend without checking their own soil. The micro-drama market is big, but the ground it feeds today is mainly apps selling coins to paying viewers. Whether your brand's sweet potatoes will grow there is a separate question.
If you try, write the stop rule before shooting episode one
For the group that should try, the usual mistake is to finish the whole series and only then ask what success means. Settle these points before the cameras roll:
- Pick one main metric, for example the share of viewers who go from episode 1 to episode 3, or searches for the brand name while the series runs. Other metrics are for reference only.
- Set the stopping threshold as a specific number. After the first three episodes, if the main metric is below that threshold, stop producing the rest instead of shooting to complete the plan.
- Invest in a writer who understands vertical pacing before investing in visuals. Every episode needs a reason for viewers to swipe to the next.
- Limit deliberate product appearances per episode. Let the story lead and the product follow.
- Plan from the start to reuse the footage, for example cutting clips for ads or for the brand's fanpage (its Facebook page), so the cost that views of the series do not recover still has somewhere to go.
Before calling a production house, answer one question yourself: if you deleted the logo from the whole series, would the story still be worth watching? If the answer is no, that budget should stay with the channels you already run well.