The overseas expansion of short dramas into Thailand has followed the exact same path that Monternet took in the early years.

In the United States, the weekly subscription of ReelShort is sold at 19.99 US dollars. In Thailand, the same membership benefits are bundled into the package of operator AIS, with a promotional price of 39 Thai baht per month, equivalent to about 1.2 US dollars. Converted to monthly fees, the gap between the two sides is about 70 times.

This price first appeared in April this year. AIS bundled ReelShort's VIP with designated 5G data traffic, and users can get the membership priced at 599 Thai baht for only 39 Thai baht. According to ReelShort, this is its first cooperation with a telecom operator on a global scale.

Seven months later, the same price appeared again. On November 2, AIS PLAY, the streaming platform under AIS, launched a new short drama zone called FlareFlow. The monthly fee is still 39 Thai baht, including VAT, with data traffic charged separately; the first batch of contents are English, Chinese and Korean dramas with Thai subtitles.

The two products share the same major shareholder behind them. FlareFlow is 100% owned by Chinese Online; the largest shareholder of Crazy Maple Studio, the operator of ReelShort, is also Chinese Online, holding 49.16% of the shares. This Beijing-based company that started with online literature has secured two positions on the platform of Thailand's highest-revenue operator with two brands.

On the other side, DramaBox from Dianzhong Technology cooperated with TrueID under the True Group in July, launching the short drama mini-program TaTang with a library of more than 40,000 titles, priced at 69 Thai baht for a weekly subscription and 159 Thai baht for a monthly subscription. True is backed by the Charoen Pokphand Group, and the entry of TaTang includes not only TrueID, but also the self-owned e-wallet TrueMoney.

In August, Chinese Online signed a broader agreement with the Charoen Pokphand Group: FlareFlow opened a dedicated zone in TaTang, and the two sides will use AIGC to remake Thai short dramas starting from October, and jointly launch an incubation program for short drama talents.

All in all, the short drama shelves of Thailand's two major telecom groups are both stocked with products from Chinese Online.

Content companies hand over their products to operators for bundling sales, operators collect payments from users, and then split the revenue with content companies. This business model was already practiced in China's Internet industry more than 20 years ago, when it was named Monternet.

I. Thais are willing to pay, but platforms are cutting prices

Thailand is a market where consumers are very willing to spend on short dramas.

In July this year, the Trade Policy and Strategy Office under Thailand's Ministry of Commerce released a research report. In the first half of 2025, the download volume of vertical short drama apps in Thailand ranked sixth in the world; in the first quarter of 2025, the in-app purchase revenue of short dramas in Thailand was about 7.75 million US dollars, ranking third outside the Chinese mainland, only behind the United States and Japan. A country with a per capita GDP less than one-tenth of that of the United States has left South Korea and the United Kingdom far behind in this category.

From a global perspective, this business has grown to a considerable scale. According to DataEye statistics, in the first three quarters of 2026, the in-app purchase revenue of overseas short drama apps exceeded 2.1 billion US dollars, with download volume exceeding 2.2 billion times. All the top 10 overseas short drama apps by download volume have Chinese backgrounds, and Chinese companies account for 9 of the top 10 by in-app purchase revenue. The figure cited by TrueID at the press conference is that the download volume of short drama apps in Thailand ranks top 3 in Southeast Asia and top 10 in the world.

Operator AIS disclosed in April that in the past year, its users' usage of short drama apps increased by 56%, with about 3 million new users added, and about 9 million customers use such applications every month. AIS has 47.1 million mobile users, and short drama users account for about one-fifth of the total. These users were originally scattered in various apps, binding their cards and paying separately, and operators could only watch the traffic pass through their own pipelines.

However, the price on this side is going down. The marked price of ReelShort's VIP in Thailand is 599 Thai baht per month, about 17.5 US dollars, which is at the same order of magnitude as its pricing in the United States. The 39 Thai baht in the AIS package is only 6.5% of this marked price.

This is exactly where the problem lies. Thai users are willing to pay, and the payment scale ranks at the forefront of the world. Why do platforms cut the price to a fraction of the original, and even hand over the right to collect money from users to operators?

II. Two unavoidable bottlenecks: payment and user acquisition

Let's talk about payment first.

The revenue of short drama apps almost all comes from in-app purchases. When users watch the 10th to 20th episode, the plot gets stuck at the most critical point, and a pop-up window asks for payment. At this time, they need to bind a card in App Store or Google Play. In the United States, this step has almost no threshold.

In Thailand, many users stop right at this step. Debit cards are very popular in Thailand, daily payments rely on cash and the scan-to-pay PromptPay system, but the credit card ownership rate has always been very low.

Payment service provider Fortumo estimated in its early cooperation with Thai operator dtac that without telecom carrier billing, digital content merchants would miss more than 85% of paying users.

Even if the card is bound, there is still a channel fee. Apple and Google charge a 15% to 30% commission on in-app purchases. Third-party institution Appfigures once counted that the total revenue of DramaBox, ShortMax and ReelShort on a certain day exceeded 3 million US dollars, but the platform actually received about 2.13 million US dollars, and nearly 30% of the revenue was left in the app stores.

Carrier billing solves both of these problems at once. Users do not need to bind cards, and the fee is directly recorded in the phone bill, even prepaid users can make purchases.

This path has long been widely used in paid mobile games and music services in Southeast Asia, and short dramas are just new commodities on the shelves.

True takes another payment path. TaTang can be directly opened in TrueMoney, and users pay with the balance of the e-wallet, which also bypasses credit cards and app stores. The two operators have different methods, but point to the same fact: in Thailand, whoever holds the payment button holds the users.

The second bottleneck is user acquisition.

A large part of the revenue of overseas short drama business flows back to Meta and TikTok. Singapore-based research institution Media Partners Asia (MPA) estimated in its report this year that ReelShort's marketing and customer acquisition expenditure in 2025 was slightly more than half of its revenue.

In that year, ReelShort generated 785 million US dollars in revenue, which was already at the top of the industry, but it still had a net loss of about 12 million US dollars.

There is a widely circulated algorithm in the industry: a short drama with an investment of 150,000 US dollars needs about 1.5 million US dollars in promotion to break even, and some producers estimate that 80% to 90% of the short dramas cannot recover the cost.

FlareFlow is in a more extreme situation. In 2025, it generated 350 million yuan in revenue, with a net loss of more than 470 million yuan, and the loss was higher than its revenue. In the first half of 2026, after the promotion expenditure was reduced, its revenue reached 252 million yuan, with a net profit of 152 million yuan. Within one year, it changed from a loss exceeding the annual revenue to a net profit margin of 60%, and the core variable in the middle is user acquisition expenditure.

Therefore, reducing the proportion of marketing expenditure has become the top priority of the whole industry. MPA predicts that ReelShort's marketing proportion will drop below 45% by 2028, and every 1 percentage point drop will increase EBITDA by about 10.5 million US dollars. One of the five cost reduction factors it listed is operator cooperation.

The pressure to reduce costs is still increasing. In October, it was reported that DramaBox, which ranks first in in-app purchase revenue, and GoodShort, which ranks fifth, were merging. The two used to bid up prices against each other on the same batch of advertising spaces.

Chen Ruiqing, who became the chairman after the merger, told the media that the two companies will no longer compete with each other, but will still compete with other players, so the investment will only increase. ByteDance's PineDrama has exceeded 100 million downloads less than a year after its launch. The more players there are on the table, the more expensive the bidding on Meta and TikTok will be.

In short, in markets with few credit cards and expensive user acquisition costs, operators hold both the payment entrance and the ready-made user pool at the same time, so platforms no longer need to spend money to pull users back from advertisements one by one.

ReelShort has clearly seen the current situation.

At the time of the cooperation release, the CEO of Crazy Maple Studio called Thailand a springboard for regional expansion. At the end of September, ReelShort announced cooperation with Indonesia's Telkomsel (over 150 million users), Philippines' Globe (about 67 million users) and Singapore's Singtel. Together with AIS, the four operators cover more than 275 million mobile connections in total.

Thailand is just the first test site.

III. The price of 39 Thai baht

Operators help platforms solve customer acquisition and payment problems, and what platforms give up is pricing power.

The pay-per-episode model of short dramas is essentially a sophisticated price discrimination system. The first 10 to 15 episodes are free, the plot gets stuck at a critical point and requires payment, and each subsequent episode needs to be unlocked with virtual coins. Casual users leave after watching the free episodes, while heavy users can spend tens of dollars in one night. The 19.99 US dollar weekly card in the United States is designed for this group of people. The profits of platforms mainly come from this small group of users.

The monthly subscription model pulls all users to the same price. A user who is willing to spend 599 Thai baht per month in the app will only pay 39 Thai baht after joining the operator's package.

The prices given by the two operators are also different. True's TaTang monthly card costs 159 Thai baht, with an original price of 199 Thai baht, which is four times that of AIS. AIS regards short dramas as an additional benefit of the package and keeps the price very low; True regards it as a separately sold content product with a much higher price. In the same market, operators have expressed their respective intentions through pricing.

There are also completely free offers. In AIS's cooperation terms, users who switch to a postpaid package of 499 Thai baht or above or newly apply for such a package can get up to one year of free ReelShort VIP. For AIS, what it is competing for is mobile phone numbers, and short dramas are free gifts for user acquisition and churn prevention.

This also explains another figure. According to MPA, ReelShort's cooperative subscriptions with AIS have exceeded 8 million. Compared with AIS's user base of about 47 million, a considerable part of this number is likely to come from free gifts and promotional benefits. The number of subscriptions has risen rapidly, but the revenue behind each subscription is very small.

Even so, the revenue still needs to be split once more.

Neither AIS nor the two platforms have announced the revenue sharing ratio. A reference is the three-tier revenue sharing system publicly disclosed by China Mobile to analysts in 2005: if the content provider is responsible for the service itself, it gets 85% of the revenue; if the operator takes over customer service, the operator keeps 30% of the revenue; if the operator is also responsible for marketing, the revenue sharing ratio can reach 50/50 at most.

AIS has carried out two months of national promotion for ReelShort, including influencers and joint advertisements. According to this logic, the more links the operator undertakes, the higher the proportion of revenue it takes away.

IV. The old script of Monternet

Isn't this model familiar?

In 2000, China Mobile was in a situation very similar to that of AIS today. It had just been established, with users and a billing system in hand, but lacked content that could make users spend more money.

Before the opening of the Sydney Olympic Games that year, China Mobile wanted to launch the SMS version of "Olympic Express", but according to the internal process, it would take at least one year to build a national SMS gateway.

Lu Xiangdong, the vice president in charge of data services, made a decision to allow SPs with strong technical capabilities to access China Mobile's network with their own gateways. One month later, the service was launched. Then the Monternet system took shape, and the rule at that time was: SPs produce content, China Mobile collects payment on their behalf, and SPs get 85% of the revenue.

Unexpectedly, this business model released huge demand. In June 2000, the total number of SMS across the network was less than 50 million, but the total annual SMS sending volume exceeded 1 billion, and reached 15.9 billion in 2001. Sina, NetEase and Sohu all survived the Internet bubble by relying on SMS value-added services.

In the following ten years, operators gradually took back the rules bit by bit. After all, the ordering, unsubscribing and billing systems are all in the hands of China Mobile.

Starting from 2003, policies to rectify SPs were introduced one after another; in 2010, China Mobile implemented the policy of "refund first, verify later" for complaints about Monternet, and all dispute costs were transferred to SPs. At that time, some SPs complained to the media that they could hardly enter the customized terminals of operators, and the rules of the game were all set by operators from beginning to end.

Similar stories have happened elsewhere. Vietnamese content companies could get 50% to 60% of the revenue share before 2008, but the share dropped to about 25% more than ten years later, and a large number of companies withdrew from the market.

There are also lessons from the music industry. In 2011, the size of China's wireless music market was about 2.4 billion yuan. After layers of revenue sharing by operators, SPs and record companies, only 3% to 5% of the revenue finally went to musicians. In the most prosperous years of CRBT, the pipeline always made the most money.

In this way, the rule is like this: channels give up profits in the early stage to attract content; after users' habits are formed, they gradually take back the revenue share and rule-making power.

Short dramas have picked up the old script of Monternet, but will the ending be the same in the end?

It is hard to say. This time, at least for now, the status of both sides of supply and demand has reversed.

First of all, for content providers, operators are only one of the entrances. In the feature phone era, there was only one operator entrance on mobile phones. Today, short drama platforms have their own apps, and are guiding more payments to their own web stores to bypass the commission of app stores. MPA lists this point together with operator cooperation as the cost reduction factor of ReelShort.

Second, the short drama content is highly concentrated. In the first quarter of 2025, ReelShort and DramaBox together captured more than 70% of the revenue of the overseas short drama market. There were hundreds of SPs in those days, but now the two major operators in Thailand are respectively connected to the two largest camps in the whole industry.

Third, Chinese Online has occupied both operators. On AIS, ReelShort is sold bundled with data packages, and FlareFlow charges separately in AIS PLAY; on True, FlareFlow has its own dedicated zone in TaTang, and also obtained the cooperation of local remake. Any operator that wants to introduce competition and lower the revenue share cannot bypass Chinese Online in its supplier list.

Of course, there are also risks. The substitutability of short drama content is very high, the threshold for translating dramas is decreasing, and AI short dramas are also pushing down the cost of each episode.

Once operators open the short drama zone to more platforms, the bargaining power will tilt to the channel side. TaTang has already accessed both DramaBox and FlareFlow, and AIS can also bring in the third and fourth platforms at any time.

V. Channels for volume expansion, apps for profit

The obvious trend is