There is a new trend that is progressively conquering the feeds of our social networks and smartphones: “microdramas” or “short dramas”, those short narrative contents, in episodes of around 60-120 seconds, which many define as soap operas of the TikTok era – even if the target goes well beyond Gen Z. Also called “verticals” due to their 9:16 format intended for smartphones, they are mini television programs of various genres (Romance, Mafia Crime etc.), pills of entertainment lasting a couple of minutes (up to three) in which a romantic story develops, often full of sexual innuendos, secret relationships and betrayals, twists and, indeed, dramas capable of keeping you in suspense (for a few seconds!).
The plot is often very simple and follows the classic rules of storytelling: a hook capable of immediately attracting the attention of the spectator intent on scrolling, a rapid development in which the tension grows and a final twist, which opens the next episode. The not particularly well-finished and often stereotyped dialogues (in many cases the result of adaptations from Chinese) are compensated by the attractiveness of the protagonists, whether they are real actors or made with AI (with production costs significantly lower than traditional TV productions), even if in recent years the quality has been increasingly improving.
The format originated at the end of the 1910s in China, where it has become a real industry and now produces revenues that exceed those at the box office of the film industry (in 2024 they generated 6.9 billion dollars in the country). A similar idea also appeared in the United States in 2020, perhaps arriving too early to take root. How does he reconstruct the New York Times in a long dedicated study, in 2020 the American television and film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg created a streaming service, Quibi, aimed at all those people dependent on smartphones (i.e. most of us…) who could enjoy short content from mobile. He imagined an entertainment app made up of short content, to meet all those people who didn’t have the time and mental energy to follow episodes with traditional lengths. The launch was not at all helped by Covid, which hindered the opportunities for use outside the home for which it was conceived, and the app was closed in just six months, with a lower number of subscribers compared to the estimated 7 million.
Today, however, in the United States, the value of revenues for 2026 is estimated to reach up to 1.5 billion dollars and at the beginning of September there was the launch of aTwist, a new dedicated platform, founded by former executives of the Showtime and NBCUniversal television networks: it is what many define as a “gold rush”, and which Variety considers it a “vertical revolution”, with the entry into the industry of players such as Lionsgate, Paramount, Fox Entertainment. Even when not made in AI, the series have much lower costs than the more extensive versions, thanks also to little-known actors, streamlined productions and low location costs.
Streaming apps are multiplying, with dedicated platforms such as DramaShorts, Shortical, DramaBox, NetShort, GoodShort, the Indian Kutingg, the South Korean Vigloo and many many others. ReelShort, for example, launched in 2022, offers dozens and dozens of series made with real actors, with titles such as “Bound by hatred”, a mafia-themed romance based on the literary saga “Born in Blood Mafia Chronicles” by Cora Reilly, in which the protagonists transform from enemies to lovers, or “Dream on”, “Just one kiss”, “The school for bad boys” (School for Bad Boys), an LGBTQ+ romance set in a correctional institution, “The vampire next door”. One of the most successful titles, “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband”, built on constant twists and turns, already has over 500 million views.
The episodes last from one to about 3 minutes and Millennials and Gen Harmonybut in a reel version: the audience, in fact, is mainly female, and is concentrated above all in the 25 to 45 age group, even if it depends on genres and platforms, which are gradually expanding the offer to reach new viewers. The genres and categories of microdramas are diverse, including Horror, Fantasy, Mafia/crime romance, Revenge, Sports and Campus Romance, Family Drama, Identity Reveal and much more.
Each platform offers different forms of subscription: in some cases, for example, users can convert the time they watch advertisements into tokens that unlock a certain number of episodes – which can also be purchased for a fee. What they all have in common, in addition to brevity, is the narrative structure of the contents, designed to keep the attention always high and provide instant emotional gratification, exploiting the same mechanisms that keep us glued to social media (and series). In general, in the freemium model an initial number of episodes is offered for free, after which the paywall is triggered and the interest developed is monetized.
Omdia, a market research company, in the report shared in February 2026, estimated global revenues of 11 billion dollars in 2025 and 14 billion by the end of 2026, 3 of which outside China, with the United States in the lead.
In the analysis for the fourth quarter of 2025, the data speaks of a wider use in the USA of ReelShort (35.7 minutes per day) compared to Netflix (24.8 minutes), Amazon Prime Video (26.9 minutes) and Disney+ (23), even if users remain lower (1.1 million subscribers to ReelShort compared to 12 million for Netflix). The European market compared to China and the United States is still immature, but growing, especially in the United Kingdom, and something is moving here too: in mid-September 2026, the Italian streaming platform Mediaset Infinity launched “MICRODRAMA”, the first section dedicated to vertical series, free of charge (among the titles there are Turkish and American series) and vertical adapted versions of Italian series such as “Sin and Shame” and “Rosy Abate” are on the way.
Meanwhile, recent news is that ABC News is adding a vertical video feed, “Verts”, to its mobile app, a format that Disney (the owner company) is expanding. It introduced it in 2025 in the app of the sports channel ESPN: according to Disney, over 26 million users interacted from mobile devices, generating over 1.8 billion minutes of viewing in the app. In short, the vertical format will continue to expand, bringing the use of content increasingly in this direction.
