Daily Consumer Spending in Top 3 Short Drama Streaming Apps Crosses $3M!

DramaBox, the highest-earning short drama streaming app, has seen revenue grow so much this year it's now close to earning $1,000,000 every day from the App Store and Google Play.

Since the beginning of the year, revenue has grown 962%!

And while it's the biggest, it's not the only one crushing it right now.

Short drama apps are a fairly recent trend that started in late 2023 and has been growing fairly consistently since. We covered short dramas in April in case you want more details, but the essence then and now is that people are spending a lot on streaming short dramas.

How much is a lot, well... Our App Intelligence shows that last Wednesday, the top three streamers which include DramaBox, ShortMax, and ReelShort, grossed a little over $3M. That's all in just a single day.

Of that $3M gross, DramaBox got to keep $913K, ShortMax $640K, and ReelShort $581K with Apple and Google taking the rest in fees. Also interesting is that while most of the revenue is coming from the App Store, as to be expected, there's still a significant chunk of revenue that's coming from Google Play. Nearly half for ShortMax. That's surprising.

Things get even more interesting when we look at growth. I compared the best day of revenue in January to the best day in July and these growth rates are astonishing.

ReelShort, which was the first to break records earlier this year, has seen revenue grow 34%. Normally I'd say this is great for the scale and the speed, but DramaBox beat it with 235%, and before you get too excited, ShortMax's revenue grew a whopping 642% this year.

I still don't understand the allure of these apps and their content, but I'm definitely not the target audience. What I do understand is the cleverness behind their monetization, which unlike traditional streamers who charge a subscription, relies on paying per episode but with in-app currency - something we see being very successful in games.