Top short drama apps by revenue and downloads

Short drama apps ranked by annual revenue

Full-year revenue is disclosed or estimated for a small number of apps, and the figures sit on different bases. ReelShort's RMB 5.72bn (about $805m) for 2025, up 97%, listed as gross revenue, comes from filings of COL Group, which holds 49.24% of operator Crazy Maple Studio on the equity method and does not consolidate ReelShort's revenue; Crazy Maple's disclosed figures for January to March 2026 were revenue of RMB 1.57bn and net profit of RMB 55.7m.

DramaBox and ShortMax are privately owned, and their figures are third-party estimates. The filed figures for FlareFlow, Kuku TV and FlexTV are company revenue. Kunlun Tech reports DramaWave and FreeReels together: annual recurring revenue above $570m as of March 2026, and monthly gross billings above $65m at the end of June 2026.

For My Drama, an estimate of about $150m for 2025 sits alongside Holywater's own figures for annual recurring revenue, about $70m as of June 2025 and about $100m for 2024, which have not been reconciled. The measures in this table are not comparable with one another: a larger number is not necessarily a larger business.

Short drama apps by full-year revenue

Quarterly and monthly revenue rankings

Period rankings come from app-intelligence vendors and change with the window and the store coverage. Sensor Tower put ReelShort first in the first quarter of 2025 at $130m of app-store spending, with DramaBox at $120m, in a quarter it put at about $700m for the category. By the first quarter of 2026, Naavik's reading of Sensor Tower's Android data outside China put DramaBox first at $95m, ahead of ReelShort at $92m and NetShort at $52m.

Monthly tables from Insightrackr put DramaBox first by revenue for 1 to 28 August 2026, up 28.8% on July, ahead of NetShort and DramaWave. Those revenue figures are modelled estimates covering in-app purchases and in-app advertising. In South Korea, Sensor Tower ranked NetShort, DramaBox, DramaWave, Vigloo and FlickReels as the top five by in-app revenue for January to September 2026; Vigloo is the only domestic app among them.

DataEye counts four non-Chinese apps in the overseas revenue top 20 for the first half of 2026: My Drama (Ukraine), Vigloo (South Korea), Shortical (Israel) and CandyJarTV, from Berlin-founded, San Francisco-based Inkitt. Chinese-origin apps took 93% of overseas in-app purchase revenue in the period.

Revenue rankings by period

Most downloaded short drama apps

Cumulative download totals count installs since launch. The figures below are Sensor Tower and DataEye estimates, except My Drama's, which is company-claimed. Their as-of dates vary across 2025 and 2026, and for the two largest the period is not consistently stated, so the list is not a snapshot of a single day. DramaBox's own claim runs higher than the vendor estimates: it says it has passed 465m downloads, an unaudited figure.

On these figures DramaBox and ReelShort have the largest totals, ahead of NetShort and ShortMax, but the dates differ: FreeReels, listed at more than 100m on Sensor Tower's count by the first quarter of 2026, recorded more than 218m downloads in the first half of 2026 alone on DataEye's count. Sensor Tower attributed 76% of all category downloads in 2024 to DramaBox, ShortMax and ReelShort, and Sensor Tower and DataEye data ranked DramaBox sixth among all streaming apps by downloads in 2025.

Download totals (as-of dates vary)

Download rankings by period

Period rankings reshuffle the order. On DataEye's first-half 2026 data, FreeReels, owned by Kunlun Tech, led overseas downloads with more than 218m, the only app above 200m, ahead of NetShort at more than 130m and ReelShort at more than 121m; ByteDance's Melolo and PineDrama both reached the top ten. Neither ReelShort nor DramaBox led on downloads in that period. Kunlun Tech, citing Sensor Tower, said in its half-year report that DramaWave and FreeReels together ranked first by monthly active users among overseas short-drama services.

PineDrama, launched in January 2026, passed 100m cumulative downloads on Sensor Tower figures reported by The Paper on 19 September 2026, with about 7m daily active users; Indonesia and Brazil account for 82% of its downloads. For August 2026, Insightrackr put DramaWave first by downloads, up 48.2% on July, and recorded Coin Drama up 236.4% month on month and twenty places, to ninth.

Download rankings by period

Free apps, views and audience share

Free, advertising-funded apps appear in audience and view rankings rather than spending rankings. In China, ByteDance's Hongguo reached 356m monthly active users in May 2026, up 79.1% year on year, on QuestMobile's figures, without a coin-based, per-episode paywall. Outside China, Owl & Co's report for the third quarter of 2026 counted 63bn microdrama views on the apps it tracks, more than half of them on TikTok's PineDrama. Among paid apps, DramaBox had 36% of views, ReelShort 29%, NetShort 20% and DramaWave 11%.

Survey rankings measure something else. In Dentsu's Entertainment Spotlight 2026, DramaBox, My Drama and ReelShort were the platforms respondents most often subscribed to, and 35% said they watch microdramas only for free on social media.

Audience and views

Why short drama app rankings disagree

Three variables decide where an app lands in a ranking, and each published table fixes them differently.

• Measure. Downloads, monthly active users, app-store spending, gross in-app purchase value, filed company revenue and views each produce a different order. In the first quarter of 2026, Sensor Tower data put FreeReels first by downloads and DramaBox first by revenue.
• Period and coverage. Cumulative totals reflect installs since launch; monthly tables show movement, such as Coin Drama's rise of twenty places in August 2026. Some series cover Android only, or exclude China.
• Vendor. Sensor Tower, DataEye, Diandian and Insightrackr publish estimates from their own data, Naavik analyses Sensor Tower's, and they do not all count the same apps. Since 12 May 2026 Sensor Tower has owned AppMagic, another widely cited source, so figures from the two are no longer independent of each other.

The rankings table lists each ranking with its measure, period and vendor, and the revenue leaderboard sets out the three revenue bases. ReelShort and DramaBox are compared in ReelShort vs DramaBox, and their owners in who owns microdrama apps.