TikTok, you’re on the clock.
A new study from Ampere Analysis has found that YouTube is the most popular social-media destination for viewers of microdramas, with nearly half (44 percent) of those who have consumed the trendy format doing so on YouTube. While vertical video may feel like the domain of TikTok (and to some degree it is: TikTok captures 38 percent of all microdrama views), YouTube’s sheer scale makes it so difficult to overcome. In September, YouTube accounted for 12.6 percent of all “TV” usage, according to Nielsen. Netflix was second with 8.3 percent — no one else claimed even five percent.
So, combined, YouTube and TikTok make up 82 percent of the microdrama viewership on social — Instagram is in there somewhere, trailer by X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Snapchat, Twitch and Threads. But who is watching these short-short drama episodes of 10 minutes or less? If not you, someone in the same room as you, statistically.
Twelve percent of internet users have consumed a microdrama on social media, Ampere found through a survey of more than 100,000 consumers. (Ampere polled 56,000 internet users aged 18-64, in two different waves, across 30 global markets.)
Leading shorts apps (and not social media ones) like DramaBox and ReelShorts have taken notice. Both are using social media platforms as distribution channels as well as feeder systems.
What should come as no surprise is the demo consuming these vertical videos. Viewers aged 18-34 are 21 percent more likely than the average viewer to have watched one of these “mini-dramas” in the past month. Nearly half (46 percent) of internet users that age watch microdramas.
The APAC (Asia-Pacific) region leads in consumption, which should also shock exactly no one. Nearly all of the existing microdrama platforms hail from China — the market is soon to be flooded with exceptions to that rule — but it is Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, specifically, with the strongest engagement numbers.