What Is Happening Next Has Already Happened

My background in both technology and internet scale content creation for pop culture obsessed audiences has given me a unique view point to see new media patterns that others might miss. I’ve been observing something in the media space for the last year that has become acutely important for my friends in entertainment. Everyone talks about how AI is changing everything, but consumption patterns have changed too. While Hollywood struggles with declining revenues and shrinking attention spans, there’s a new industry quietly making billions by selling the same product Hollywood makes, but chopped up and sold 25 cents at a time.

They’re called micro dramas, and most Americans have never heard of them.

Here’s what’s weird: these things started in China and are now the fastest-growing form of entertainment in the US. Three of the most popular apps were downloaded 34 million times last month, grossing $78 million in revenue. They’ve knocked longtime favorites like YouTube and Netflix from their top spots in the app stores.

I talked to a director working in this space who told me he’s made movies for $200,000 that generated over $30 million in revenue. That’s a 150x return. When was the last time you heard those numbers from Hollywood?

So I started digging.

Micro dramas aren’t really a new format. They’re soap operas perfectly adapted for phones. Each story is a full 90-minute movie cut into 60-90 episodes that are each about 90 seconds long. They shoot with the same cameras Hollywood uses—just rotated 90 degrees.

The monetization model is what blew my mind.

You watch the first 10-15 episodes for free, then pay 25-50 cents to keep watching. That 50 cents happens 80 times over the course of a complete story. People regularly spend $30-40 per movie without realizing it.

Never. But I might pay 50 cents to see what happens next. Especially if the last episode ended with “You slept with my husband.”

Here’s the key: every 90 seconds, there has to be a cliffhanger. That means 90 cliffhangers per movie. “You slept with my husband” can end one episode, and “You slept with my husband” can start the next one, with just a slightly different inflection. Sometimes the cliffhanger is dramatic—a character death. Sometimes it’s tiny—just a meaningful look. The variability keeps you guessing, which makes it psychologically harder to stop.

They’ve weaponized the scroll.

The audience surprised me. It’s women aged 25-55, globally—the same demographic that used to watch soap operas. Women comprise 70% of users on these platforms. These aren’t people who got left behind by technology. They’re people who got left behind by entertainment.

Hollywood stopped making mid-budget romantic dramas. Television moved to prestige content that requires full attention. Micro dramas give them beautiful people, romantic storylines, and the ability to watch during gaps in their day.

This has created a parallel film industry with completely different economics. The creators I’ve spoken with are averaging 12 feature films per year. That’s a movie a month. They operate completely outside the union system with lower budgets, faster timelines, and global crews.

It’s like the entire film industry forked, and most people don’t know the other branch exists.

Are micro dramas training people to have shorter attention spans? Maybe. But there’s a paradox: while each episode is designed for fragmented attention, people often binge entire series in one sitting. That’s 90 minutes of sustained engagement.

Maybe they’re just repackaging long-form content for how people actually live now.

The reason this matters isn’t just the money. It’s that micro dramas represent something Hollywood can’t easily replicate: content designed from the ground up for mobile consumption.

Hollywood will probably try to get into this space, but I don’t think they can. The deeper problem is that traditional Hollywood creators fundamentally don’t understand how content works on mobile.

Hollywood Will Miss This. Digital-Native Creators Will Win It. I Have the Internet Media Receipts to Cash This Check.

Look at Quibi. Jeffrey Katzenberg raised $1.75 billion and hired A-list talent from across Hollywood. The concept seemed obvious: premium short-form content for mobile.

But Quibi failed because they missed something crucial: content created for mobile runs at a completely different speed than traditional TV and movies.

Quibi Tried to Shrink Hollywood for Mobile. Micro Dramas Built Something Entirely New.

This is the fundamental difference. Quibi took existing Hollywood talent and production methods and squeezed them into shorter formats. Micro dramas started from scratch, asking what storytelling would look like if it were designed specifically for phones.

I’ve spent years creating sticky web content projects that have scaled, and there’s something I learned early: frequency and consistency always beat production perfection. You’re better off shipping 12 decent videos per month than one perfect video per quarter.

Micro dramas operate exactly like this. They use a digital media programming mindset—ship fast, iterate, respond to what works. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s creative development process can take years to make anything. Studios spend months in development, then months in pre-production, then months shooting, then months in post. By the time they ship, the market has moved.

If I were building a micro drama studio tomorrow, I wouldn’t hire TV or movie producers. I’d look for teams from social media and ad creative departments. Those teams natively understand the speed and beat structures that mobile consumers expect. They’ve spent years figuring out how to grab attention in the first three seconds and create compelling narratives within severe time constraints.

Hollywood veterans have trained their instincts around long-form storytelling for decades. That’s great for traditional content, but becomes a liability when you need cliffhangers every 90 seconds.

I have nothing against genius showrunners like David Simon, but he would be the last person I’d hire to run vertical stories today. He may even agree with me.

The Chinese companies behind these apps have figured out something about human attention and monetization that Western companies are just starting to understand. One platform’s Spanish version of an English-language series has gained nearly half the 450 million views of the original. They’re not just translating content—they’re recreating it with different actors for each market.

But this might not be a replacement for traditional entertainment. It might just be a new category.

In my discussions with people working in this space, I keep hearing: “We’re separating art and commerce. You want to watch celebrities eat hot food, you go to YouTube. You want to see a new Wes Anderson movie, you go to the theater.”

Maybe the future of entertainment isn’t one format replacing another. Maybe it’s having the right format for the right moment.

Sometimes you want Oppenheimer on a big screen with full attention. Sometimes you want beautiful people making out while you wait for the subway.

The companies that understand this distinction—and can serve both needs—are probably going to win.

I used to think the future of entertainment was about better technology or bigger budgets or more sophisticated storytelling.

Turns out it might just be about understanding when someone wants to pay 50 cents to find out what happens next.