I’ve been digging into the latest data on the microdrama, or “vertical drama,” boom. If you still think this is a niche fad for bored moms in Asia, look again.

In 2025, China’s short drama market, including the fast-growing AI Motion Comics sector, hit an estimated $13.8 billion across 660 million viewers. Nearly 70% of internet users there are spending 120+ minutes a day on microdramas, generating almost twice the revenue of China’s entire theatrical box office.

We are witnessing the emergence of a massive new medium in real-time. Beyond the raw billions, here are five surprising trends that matter for creators:

Will this sweep the West or stall like livestream shopping?  Overseas markets grew 90% from mid-2024 to mid-2025.  Recent studies predict the non-China market to exceed $6 Billion this year.   Experts are predicting a breakout in India and the US within the next 12 months.  But expect it to develop more like mobile gaming than streaming, as performance marketing, led by pay to install, drives growth.

As ReelShort and DramaBox battle for domination, the U.S. has become a proving ground.  It has a higher revenue per download than elsewhere, and ad supported has begun to supplant in-app purchase.  But US content is still hyper-concentrated on female-oriented romance. Male-oriented genres lag badly. However, with the rise of AI Motion Comics I expect this to rapidly change.

Creators who move fast will find this format profitable (just look at Dhar Mann’s 40-episode deal with Holywater).  But I don't think it'll dominate time-spent like in China or trigger the same collapse in traditional/online video viewership. More likely? It evolves into ad-supported vertical TV.  And time spent will likely be stolen from other short-form video platforms, along with casual mobile gaming. 

Want to keep up on what’s happening?  Follow WenWen Han, Brandan Dennahy, Patrick Wilkens and Evan Shapiro – links to their latest relevant posts here: (WenWen, Brandan, Patrick, Evan)

UK-based Little Dot Studios manages 800+ channels across 930m subscribers and  just released a very data-heavy whitepaper about what they’ve seen over the last 18 months.  My top takeaways:

My take: YouTube success today requires strong ops and rapid iteration.  Talent and consistency just aren’t enough anymore. Those who win on YouTube today operate more like growth hackers than creative savants.  Oh, and TV-length is the new sweet spot for long-form videos.

But here’s the warning.  Little Dot’s data focuses on their own network of IP-heavy and TV-like content.  Whether they translate directly to mid-tier or emer

Apple plans a “transformative update” this spring that should shake up the video podcasting world.  The new Apple Podcast app will allow easy switching between the video and audio version of a podcast, along with dynamic ad insertion and HLS support too. Apple plans on charging ad networks an impression-based fee for dynamically inserted ads, and the move seems to increasingly devalue RSS.  They didn’t announce this, but it probably ties into the upcoming refresh for AppleTV, because that “seamless audio to video switching” is a very Apple thing to make special and elegant.

This feels a little bit like the old “player” wars back before YouTube became dominant.  Everyone wanted you to use their player, because they served the ads – and ultimately, he who serves the ads can undercut he who sells them.  It’s also a direct assault on YouTube and Spotify, although Apple is very late to the game and playing its own brand of 3D checkers. That hasn’t worked lately. (see the Vision Pro). Apple has the devices and the ecosystem. But elegant technology simply won’t be enough to beat out YouTube’s billion monthly podcast viewers.  (On Audio)

Several Olympic figure skaters have been in hot water over their music choices, leading to last minute changes and narrowly averted disaster.  It would be a funny footnote if it weren't so familiar. I've been hearing similar horror stories from brands and creator execs all year as copyright indemnification has moved from a departmental headache into a full enterprise issue.

Top providers get it. Epidemic Sound has been solving this for brands and creators for years and will presumably accelerate their push into sports and athletics. An Adobe exec confirmed to me last week that Firefly offers IP indemnification for copyright infringement claims too. 

As AI-generated images, video and music scale across marketing and content operations, and as creators look to sell their back catalogs to big media, liability exposure accelerates. Procurement and business affairs have been activated. AI audio and video tools are no longer impulse buys. And any acquired or sponsored video must be squeaky clean too. 

The Olympic Committee probably won't strip a gold medal for a rights violation. But your brand or distribution deal could get killed before it's even born. (Front Office Sports)

Related: New Sony tech promises to identify original copyrighted music and images inside AI-generated media.   (Nikkei Asia)

NEWS ABOUT NEWSLETTERS: Less than a third of Americans regularly get news from newsletters, according to a new study from Pew.  Most subscribers don’t read all they receive, and only 3% call newsletter their favorites source.  Sounds like a broken medium, right?  WRONG!

Here’s what really matters to creators.  More Americans have paid for a newsletter than use one regularly.  This inverted relationship is unique to the format, and implies that newsletters are not about reach but about trust.  And 71% of readers subscribe to fewer than five, which means you aren’t competing with everyone, just one of the few.  There’s also rough age parity across newsletter readers, burying the myth that only old folks read newsletters.  And with Black and Asian Americans overindexing at 40%, that suggests newsletters are serving under-represented communities.  Newsletters are like licorice (and the Grateful Dead). They aren’t for everyone – but those who like them really, really like them. (Pew Research Center)

THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY FOR CREATORS RIGHT NOW:  According to a new report from fal.ai, 62% of individual creators are adopting generative AI tools now – that’s nearly twice as fast as at bigger companies.  The report also shows that any production advantage that big media companies had has vaporized.  An individual in their basement in Bangkok can make a cinematic experience that rivals anything from Hollywood.  

Although the report concludes that in the future expertise will narrow around orchestration, that taste will become an even bigger gate, and that “storytelling” will matter most.  But while it celebrates the democratization of creation, it fails to consider what that means for traditional media AND traditional creators.  I’ll say it.  It means disruption at tectonic scale.  

The usual caveats apply.  This is a report from a company that makes money from generative media adoption, so take it as a self-serving but directionally valuable study, not predictive.  The study validates the McKinsey and Wistia reports we highlighted last week.   (fal.ai, McKinsey, Wistia)

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100% written by me – no human or AI ghostwriters were involved in the production (except for the cover art!) and AI was very lightly used for editing.

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