Who remembers Quibi? A flameout for the ages, going from $1.8b in funding to shutting down in 6 months.
As chaotic as Quibi was, I liked the general shift towards on-the-go content consumption in a mobile bite-sized vertical format genre.
In many ways they were too early, although they also made many missteps. Fast forward to today and there are now many microcontent video apps making millions monthly.
Some of the issues with Quibi: covid + being forced to compete with bigger screens with users couped up at home, high subscription costs for unproven value, premium content when in reality should've been more left curve, and boomer management, not embracing memetic virality of content fast enough (couldn't screenshot in the app for months).
I think a storm is brewing for the rise of micromedia such as microdramas to take off in a bigger way now, especially in a time where Hollywood is hurting and the old school route no longer works as well.
Here's a few assertions:
AI-driven content boom - The rise of AI-driven, prompt-based tools is making content creation faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Over time, creators will be able to generate increasingly higher-quality movies (see runway film festival winners) and multimodal outputs with minimal effort.
The rise of brainrot - Attention spans keep dwindling, the average length of content consumed continues to decrease
Graphic: Saylor Hark Gamification of interactive media - I'd split this into parts: passive and active interactive media. Today things like story branches (ie choose A or B) have been tried but still early. Longer term, a16z anticipates in ~2 years, we'll have commercially viable and fully generative interactive video. This will greatly open up the design space.
What's cooking today?
A handful of vertical video apps have seen triple-digit percentage growth in both downloads and in-app spending over the past year. In Q1 '24, 66 short drama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox pulled in a record revenue of $146m in global consumer spending (source: app figures).
In China in particular, there's been a rise in the popularity of microdramas, which can be described as modern-age mini soap operas. In China, the microdrama market was estimated at 38B RMB ($5.3B) Shoutout Naavik for the deep dive.
The typical format for most of these apps is quite similar.
Release content weekly usually with each series being 50+ episodes that are 1-3 minutes long
The first handful of episodes are free and also crossposted to TikTok for UA
Afterwards, users unlock episodes by via ads or through payment in virtual coins
Below is a screenshot of what ReelShort, a popular microdrama app looks like. Per appmagic, ReelShort made an estimated $28m in the month of August across ios/google play stores.
They borrow from tiktok with a "for you" discovery feed for discovery and incorporate gamification (ie streaks etc) to draw people back in. I watched a few of the episodes of Breaking the Ice and the content was basically what I expected, brainrot in its purest form.
Dramas remain one of the most popular genres as evidenced by growth in spend and downloads.
At the app level, Kuaishou also stands out (a Douyin/TikTok competitor), valued at $22B.
In 2023, Kuaishou rode the microdrama wave with 94m paid DAUs / those watching more than 10 episodes a day.
Other content trends
Top down: Indie creators running faceless channels (top down) like Mpminds (30 sec ai powered stories about cats).
Bottom up: Thematic content such as dark fantasy is captivating tiktok audiences in re-imagining old IP in new forms. There are 17.5k posts under the dark fantasy sound
Interactive stories: Netflix is working on interactive stories, a collection of interactive stories based on hit netflixs shows and movies where users can immerse themselves in RPG.
Thoughts
It's a fool's errand to compete with Netflix head on. The largest competitors such as Paramount and Disney are cutting back to reduce streaming losses. Even with microdramas, it is a difficult endeavor with 90-95% losing money and up to 90% of revenue in the industry spent on advertising fees (source).
In contrast to global box office movies, it is much cheaper to produce microdrama content. However, similar to mobile gaming, acquisition costs remain high hurting margins. On the flip side, short form content = faster feedback loops, less execution risk, more shots on goal for virality.
I believe platforms can still capture a slice of Netflix's $285b MC by competing on niches. They will need to find more creative ways to more cheaply acquire users.
Remixable content: Those who effectively leverage this to the max extent possible may be more competitive. This could mean providing easy remixing tools for fans to create CGC amplifying the voice across different socials. Perhaps a more difficult but powerful route if it works would be programmable IP for remixing and expansion. There are numerous folks developing in this space like Story protocol.
Experimental monetization models - I like the notion of building a cultural presence and then asset creation and/or monetization around the brand (give more ownership to community). A few examples:
Every week, Doodles makes a viral short available for mint for a limited time (5.2k creator earnings on last release)
The skibidi toilet youtube content account has amassed 17.5b views and 43.6M subs. A hypothetical monetization experiment would be if they dropped a NFT collection around their host of characters (skibidi toilets, camera heads, TV men, G-man) or even crazier a branded memecoin distributed retroactively based on amount of content fans engaged with.
Long tail IP - In most creator platforms today, most media is created top down. if the infra is built to enable anybody to create and extend IP around their brand with the help of their fans, large creators could effectively leverage their distribution to further cross-sell the platform.
Ultimately, it looks like a good portion of media is trending more towards shorter form gamified content and also from passive to participatory media. Over time I expect the line to blur between storytelling, games, and media.
Still need to think through some more the ramifications of incorporating the speculative nature of crypto. It could galvanize early fanbases of microdramas/microcontent as a way to reach a bigger audiences faster and also give them more skin in the game.
