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The Short Drama Index
Vertical short-drama apps publish enormous amounts of video and almost no numbers. We track their public pages
daily, so these are measurements rather than estimates: how much gets released, how long a series runs, how far in
the paywall sits, and what the stories are about.
Data through Sep 30, 2026. Free to reuse with a link to this page.
How much gets released
Release volume is the number people get wrong most often. In the last two weeks the busiest single day was
Sep 22, 2026, with 82 new English titles. The apps work at completely
different tempos: one ships dozens a day, the other a handful a week.
| Date | DramaBox | ReelShort |
|---|
| Sep 30, 2026 | 70 | — |
| Sep 29, 2026 | 53 | — |
| Sep 28, 2026 | 54 | — |
| Sep 27, 2026 | 19 | 1 |
| Sep 26, 2026 | 21 | 1 |
| Sep 25, 2026 | 33 | — |
| Sep 24, 2026 | 55 | 1 |
| Sep 23, 2026 | 49 | 1 |
| Sep 22, 2026 | 81 | 1 |
| Sep 21, 2026 | 56 | — |
| Sep 20, 2026 | 24 | 1 |
| Sep 19, 2026 | 21 | — |
| Sep 18, 2026 | 44 | 8 |
| Sep 17, 2026 | 36 | 1 |
New titles by the release date each app publishes. Days with no entry means none we saw.
How long a series runs
A short drama is not short in total. Episodes last a minute or two, but a series runs
50 to
73.2 episodes on average
— about 76 minutes end to end across the 800 DramaBox series where every episode length is published, roughly a feature film and a half.
| App | Series tracked | Average episodes | Shortest | Longest |
|---|
| DramaBox | 800 | 50 | 14 | 142 |
| ReelShort | 476 | 63.8 | 15 | 222 |
| GoodShort | 20 | 73.2 | 52 | 89 |
Where the paywall starts
Every app opens a series with free episodes and then asks for coins. The cut lands in a remarkably narrow band:
viewers get through roughly a sixth of a series before paying.
| App | Series measured | Free episodes | Share of the run |
|---|
| DramaBox | 800 | 8.6 | 18.4% |
| ReelShort | 476 | 9.8 | 16.3% |
| GoodShort | 14 | 7.4 | 9.8% |
From the paywall markers the apps publish on their own pages, averaged per app. These are the apps' figures, not
purchases we made, and a title's free count can change when an app runs a promotion.
What the stories are about
Short drama runs on a small set of premises. Classifying every title by the tags its app assigns, the top
12 account for 3,106 of the tag assignments we hold. A title usually carries
several, so these overlap.
How much they get watched
Each app publishes a view counter on its own pages. They are not measured the same way, so the columns below
should be read down, never across: a DramaBox count and a ReelShort count are different units.
| App | Median series | Most watched title |
|---|
| DramaBox | 101K | 440M |
| ReelShort | 44M | 788M |
| GoodShort | 4M | 12M |
The people in them
The same faces recur constantly. We hold 665 cast credits across
270 performers, and the busiest appear in a dozen or more series each.
Method, and what this does not cover
A scraper reads the public web pages of ReelShort, DramaBox and GoodShort every day and records what they publish: title, episode
count, tags, cast, release date, view counter and paywall marker. Figures here are computed from that database
at build time, covering 5,471 daily observations between
Sep 10, 2026 and Sep 30, 2026.
Limits worth stating plainly:
- Coverage is the English catalogue. Other languages are out of scope.
-
Coverage per app is uneven. DramaBox exposes its full catalogue newest-first, so release counts for it are
close to complete. ReelShort exposes shelves rather than a full index, so its release counts are a floor, not
a total.
- View counters are each app's own number. They are not audited and not comparable between apps.
- Paywall depth comes from the apps' published markers rather than from buying coins.
- Premise classification is ours, mapped from the tags each app assigns to its own titles.
Journalists and researchers: the underlying numbers are free to use with attribution, and we are happy to run a
specific cut for you. Ask here.
Cite as: DramaCatalog Short Drama Index, September 2026, https://dramacatalog.com/data/
