Even five years ago, the idea that a viewer would voluntarily trade a two-hour movie for a vertical clip of a couple of minutes sounded like a marketing fantasy. Today, short films and vertical mini-series are eating away at the attention of major platforms faster than they can react.
Short Films Against the Giants: Why the Format Took Off Now
The main currency of streaming has long been not content but attention, and the short format fights for it more precisely than the long one. Vertical video is tailored to the way a person actually holds the phone, and an episode of one and a half to three minutes fits into any pause — a queue, the subway, a lunch break. That is exactly why platforms like Hanimax, which build their catalog around short vertical series, are gaining an audience where classic feature-length content is struggling.
Big services are built on a different logic: to keep a subscriber for a long season and not let go. The short format, on the contrary, does not require any commitment from the viewer — it takes engagement here and now. At the same time, it does not try to replace cinema entirely but occupies those empty spaces in the day that big platforms simply could not reach.
Numbers That Are Hard to Believe
Behind the format stand not only viral clips but also tough economics. According to Deloitte estimates, revenue from mini-series apps in 2025 amounts to about 3.8 billion dollars, and the forecast for 2026 almost doubles to 7.8 billion dollars. Even more telling is the quarterly dynamic: global collections of short dramas jumped from 178 million dollars in the first quarter of 2024 to almost 700 million dollars for the same period in 2025.
The audience has also ceased to be niche. By March 2025, about 30 percent of Gen Z and millennials in the US were already familiar with the format, and the United States itself became the largest market outside China. If we count together with China, the estimates climb even higher — Omdia speaks of 11 billion dollars for 2025. The key parameters of the format can be conveniently collected in one table.
|
Metric |
Short-form streaming today |
|
Typical episode length |
1–3 minutes |
|
Weekly ARPU |
Up to $20 |
|
DramaBox registered users |
90 million |
|
China’s share of global revenue |
83% |
|
Revenue from paid unlocks |
Over 60% |
|
Top Discovery Channel |
Social media |
Numbers by ARPU are especially telling: the audience of short dramas pays not one-time but through subscriptions and microtransactions for unlocking episodes. Given this level of return per user, the economics of the format rest not on cheap reach but on dense engagement from a small but consistently paying audience.
Who Is Already Making Money on Vertical
Behind the label of short films stand quite specific companies with serious turnover. In the first quarter of 2025, ReelShort collected about 130 million dollars, and DramaBox collected around 120 million dollars in just three months, and this is without counting the Chinese market. Major studios have also stopped watching from the sidelines: Fox Entertainment, as early as the end of 2024, entered the capital of the Ukrainian studio Holywater with its MyDrama platform and committed to releasing at least 200 vertical series over two years.
It is also telling that leading short-drama apps regularly make it into the top 25 downloads in the American App Store — until recently, such places were held only by major social networks and streaming giants. Although the main revenue still comes from subscriptions and micropayments, the fight for the viewer increasingly takes place on social networks, from where short dramas pull in a new audience.
Why Viewers and Creators Choose Short
Success rests not only on viewing convenience. The format has proven viable for several reasons at once:
- Short episodes fit into fragmented screen time between tasks;
- Vertical shooting removes an extra barrier and does not force turning the phone;
- A cliffhanger at the end of each episode holds stronger than a one-hour episode of a classic series;
- Micropayments for unlocking monetize interest instantly.
For creators, the story is no less attractive because the entry threshold here is many times lower than in big productions. A small team shoots a vertical drama in a matter of weeks and on budgets incomparable to a series for a major platform. Genres multiply quickly at the same time — from office romances and revenge to fantasy with vampires — and each hits its own narrow audience.
Cemetery of Ambitions: What Quibi Taught Us
The history of the format is also a warehouse of expensive failures. In 2020, Quibi raised 1.75 billion dollars in investments and stars of Spielberg’s caliber, yet closed after half a year without reaching even a million subscribers. The lesson turned out to be simple: short films work not as scaled-down cinema but as a separate language — with its own vertical orientation, rhythm, and mobile habit.
Today, even the giants have understood this. Netflix, as early as 2025, began testing a vertical feed of short videos in its mobile app, and artificial intelligence is taking on localization and dubbing more actively, reducing the cost of entering new markets. Thus, the question is no longer whether the format will survive but who will manage to take a place in it.
The Bottom Line
The short format does not bury feature-length content but takes from it what it has long lost — lightness and immediacy. While big platforms argue about subscription prices, vertical dramas are already retraining an entire generation to watch differently. It is in this change of habit, and not in the length of the clip, that the real future of streaming lies.
