The Short Drama Marketing Machine: How KANS Turned 3-Minute Videos into a Billion-Yuan Business, and What Happened Next

In 2025, over 40,000 new short drama series launched in China. ReelShort, the leading overseas short drama app, generated US$130 million in revenue in a single quarter. AI-powered productions now cut costs to one-fifth of traditional methods while halving timelines. And the Chinese short drama market has grown to over RMB 63 billion, with revenues on track to surpass the domestic box office.

All of this traces back to one brand’s gamble in early 2023. KANS (韩束), a declining Chinese skincare brand, invested under RMB 50 million in five three-minute drama series on Douyin. The return was RMB 3.3 billion in annual sales. It was the proof of concept that launched short drama marketing as a category.

But the story did not end with success. KANS’s own founder later admitted that short drama effectiveness had dropped 40-fold as supply exploded and viewership plateaued. By late 2023, the brand had essentially stopped producing dramas. What KANS proved was not that short dramas are a permanent formula. It proved that the first mover in content commerce captures extraordinary value, and that what comes after requires a fundamentally different playbook.

KANS' Red Waist gift box, the hero product behind the short drama marketing revolution of 2023 (Source: KANS Official)

The 2023 Playbook: How KANS Built the Original Short Drama Sales Machine

KANS, owned by Shanghai-listed Chicmax Group, saw brand revenue decline over 20 percent in 2022. The company’s leadership made a pivotal decision: shift from Tmall to Douyin and bet on custom short dramas.

The partnership with Douyin creator Jiang Shiqi (姜十七) produced five drama series, 80 episodes totaling 240 minutes of content, for RMB 45 to 50 million. Total viewership exceeded 5 billion. Monthly Douyin sales surged from RMB 10 million to over RMB 500 million in under a year.

The conversion architecture was what made it work. Each three-minute episode exploited Douyin’s auto-play to create binge-watching behavior. The dramas built “A3 audience” pools (users primed for purchase) with conversion rates of 5 to 10 percent versus 1 to 3 percent for standard ads. The flagship Red Waist gift box sold 6.34 million units. Full-year brand revenue hit RMB 3.09 billion, up 143.8 percent. KANS became the number-one beauty brand on Douyin for 14 consecutive months.

Why It Stopped Working

KANS’s success created the conditions for its own decline. Within months, every beauty brand in China wanted a short drama. Proya produced 11 dramas with over 1.2 billion views. Marubi partnered with the same creator and saw a 20-fold increase in brand searches. SkinCeuticals, Lancôme, and other international brands followed. Content homogenized rapidly. Production costs rose two to three times above 2023 levels as demand for short drama creators outstripped supply.

KANS’s founder Lü Yixiong quantified the problem bluntly: short drama supply had increased 20-fold while prices doubled, but viewership stayed flat. That meant effectiveness dropped roughly 40-fold. By November 2023, KANS had effectively stopped producing short dramas. Later series like 《Let Love Be Bound》 managed only 230 million views, a fraction of earlier performances.

The model had a deeper structural problem: platform dependency. In 2024, KANS revenue grew to RMB 5.59 billion, accounting for 82.3 percent of its parent company’s total. Nearly all of it flowed through Douyin. Building a business on one platform’s algorithm is building on rented land.

KANS x Jiang Shiqi short drama series on Douyin (Source: Digitaling)

Short Drama Marketing 2.0: What Replaced the KANS Playbook

The short drama industry did not collapse after KANS. It evolved. By mid-2025, 662 million Chinese viewers were watching short dramas, and 59 percent of new non-paid dramas on Douyin and Kuaishou were brand-customized content. But the model has changed in four fundamental ways.

First, AI has rewritten the cost equation. Ling Tan, a 46-episode AI-powered short drama produced in Shanghai, hit 10 million views as China’s first AIGC live-action-style long-form series, with production costs at one-fifth of traditional methods. AI applications now increase planning efficiency by 50 percent and reduce post-production costs by 30 percent. At least nine financing events in the “AI plus short drama” space occurred in 2025. The production barrier that once required RMB 50 million and a top creator has dropped dramatically.

Second, short dramas have gone global. Over 300 overseas short drama apps are now active, a four-fold increase year on year. ReelShort leads with cumulative revenue of US$490 million. DramaBox follows at US$450 million. Chinese company FlareFlow reached 10 million downloads and US$20 million in user spending within three months of its April 2025 launch. The hybrid model, Chinese creative planning with local actors and culturally adapted storylines, is creating an entirely new content export category. Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East have emerged as the fastest-growing markets, with localized productions in languages from Arabic to Portuguese.

Third, the format has moved far beyond beauty. Brands from F&B to automotive to gaming now commission short dramas. Mixue (蜜雪冰城) used a time-travel drama to generate 100,000+ likes in five days. Chabaidao’s custom drama hit 3.6 billion cumulative plays. Even SAIC Volkswagen produced branded dramas with film actors. The category is no longer a beauty marketing tactic. It is a cross-industry content commerce format that is reshaping how brands think about the relationship between attention and conversion.

Fourth, monetization has flipped. In 2023, roughly 70 percent of short dramas used a paid-unlock model. By 2025, 66 percent use a free, ad-supported model. This shift reflects short dramas’ evolution from niche paid content to a mainstream advertising medium. Over 300 active advertisers participated in H1 2025, a 53.9 percent year-on-year increase.

What Global Brands Should Take from This

The KANS story is not a template to copy. It is a timestamp: the moment when content commerce proved it could outperform traditional advertising at scale. The brands attempting to replicate KANS’s exact 2023 playbook in 2025 are discovering sharply diminished returns. The ones succeeding are adapting the underlying principle, that narrative entertainment can be engineered into a purchase funnel, to entirely new contexts and formats.

Three lessons stand out. First, the window for first-mover advantage in any new content format is measured in months, not years. KANS captured extraordinary value precisely because it moved before the market understood what was happening. Once competitors flooded in, the economics degraded rapidly. Brands evaluating short drama marketing today need to identify the specific angle, platform, or audience where they can be first, rather than joining an already-crowded field.

Second, content commerce only works when the content is genuinely entertaining. KANS’s dramas succeeded because audiences watched them voluntarily, not because they recognized the format as advertising. As the market matured and quality dropped, viewers stopped engaging. Any brand entering this space must invest in storytelling quality, not just production volume.

Third, the format is crossing borders faster than most brands realize. Interactive shoppable dramas, where product tags appear on screen and viewers can purchase without pausing, are projected to reach a US$7.8 billion market by 2026. TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping, and Amazon Live are all experimenting with narrative commerce content. With AI slashing production costs and overseas apps like ReelShort proving demand beyond China, the infrastructure for global short drama marketing is falling into place.

The question for international brands is no longer whether this format matters. It is whether they will be the first mover on their platform, capturing outsized value the way KANS did in 2023, or the follower who arrives after the economics have already shifted.

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Double V Consulting helps international brands navigate the Chinese market and supports Chinese brands looking to expand globally, from market research and brand strategy to social media content and KOL campaigns. Talk to our team.