By T N Ashok
The internet is rocking. It’s not Trump with his strikes on Iran breaking the ceasefire. It’s not India PM Modi getting another great civilian award from Australia or New Zealand. It’s the Vertical Screen Melodrama — VSM — that set the internet on fire just as Facebook, Instagram did when they made them.
And they are competing with internet OTT platforms such as Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney, Sony, for the Gen Z who might not have the patience to sit through 8 to 9 episodes of a spy thriller or a social drama. This is becoming an addiction like a video game.
Scroll through TikTok, Instagram Reels or Facebook for a few minutes and chances are you will stumble upon a familiar scene. A poor waitress is slapped by a wealthy customer. A young bride is humiliated by her rich in-laws. An office peon is ridiculed by his arrogant boss. A delivery boy is insulted at the gates of a luxury mansion. Just as the victim appears broken, the screen fades to black.
You wait. The next clip reveals that the waitress is the daughter of a billionaire. The peon is the company’s secret owner. The delivery boy is a decorated war hero. Justice is served. The bullies are exposed. The underdog triumphs.
Before you realise it, you have watched 40 clips. Welcome to the world of vertical micro-dramas, the fastest-growing entertainment business on the internet.
What appears to be harmless social media content is, in reality, a sophisticated global industry worth billions of dollars, built on psychology, artificial intelligence, mobile technology and one precious commodity—your attention.
The phenomenon began quietly in China, where producers realised that younger audiences no longer had the patience to sit through two-hour films or even 45-minute television episodes. Smartphones have changed viewing habits forever.
Instead of fighting shrinking attention spans, producers embraced them. They compressed an entire soap opera into dozens of episodes lasting between 30 seconds and two minutes, filmed vertically so they filled an entire phone screen. Every episode ended on a cliffhanger. Every emotional payoff was delayed. Every twist demanded another swipe.
The Chinese call them duanju—short dramas. What began as an experiment has become one of the biggest revolutions in entertainment. China now has hundreds of millions of micro-drama viewers, and the domestic market has grown into a business worth more than US$7 billion. Internationally, dedicated micro-drama apps have recorded hundreds of millions of downloads, with forecasts pointing to explosive global growth over the rest of the decade.
Today, English-speaking audiences are seeing these dramas flood Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Many viewers assume they are amateur productions. They are anything but.
Behind them are specialised production houses operating almost like Hollywood assembly lines. Companies develop scripts, hire actors, shoot entire series in a matter of days and edit hundreds of episodes for mobile viewing. Artificial intelligence increasingly assists with translation, dubbing, subtitles and voice cloning, allowing the same drama to appear in English, Hindi, Spanish and Bahasa Indonesia within days of its original release.
Some of the biggest players include ReelShort, DramaBox, GoodShort and FlexTV. Most began by adapting Chinese stories before moving into locally produced English-language content featuring American, British and Australian actors. Their ambition is simple—to create a global entertainment business that sits somewhere between TikTok and Netflix.
So why do these stories all look the same? Because they are based on emotional formulas refined by algorithms. Researchers have long known that the human brain craves closure. Psychologists call it the “curiosity gap” or the Zeigarnik effect—the tendency to remember unfinished stories better than completed ones.
Micro-drama producers exploit this relentlessly. Every 30 or 60 seconds the viewer is denied closure. The insult is delivered but revenge is postponed. The proposal is interrupted. The divorce papers remain unsigned. The billionaire’s identity is concealed.
Your brain wants resolution. The algorithm happily supplies another episode. The themes themselves are remarkably consistent across cultures. The poor defeat the rich. The bullied become powerful. The betrayed spouse returns triumphant. The neglected daughter inherits the empire.
These are modern versions of Cinderella, David versus Goliath and the classic revenge saga, compressed into smartphone-sized emotional bursts.
The business model is just as carefully engineered. TikTok, Instagram Reels and Facebook rarely pay significant sums for these videos directly. Instead, they function as gigantic marketing machines. The first few episodes are released free to capture attention. Once viewers become emotionally invested, they are directed to dedicated apps where they must subscribe or purchase virtual coins to unlock the remaining episodes. Advertising revenue, subscriptions, licensing and in-app purchases combine to create an extraordinarily profitable business.
Some successful series earn millions of dollars despite costing only a fraction of a conventional television production. Budgets are modest because there are no expensive visual effects, exotic locations or superstar salaries. The emphasis is on speed rather than perfection.
Quantity often matters more than artistic excellence. Algorithms determine which stories perform best, and successful formulas are quickly reproduced. The influence of artificial intelligence is growing rapidly.
AI tools now help writers generate story ideas, editors identify the most dramatic cuts, translators localise dialogue and synthetic voices dub performances into multiple languages. Producers can test different thumbnails, titles and endings to discover which versions maximise viewer retention.
Entertainment is becoming data-driven. Every pause, swipe, replay and abandonment is measured. If millions of viewers stop watching after Episode 14, future scripts are rewritten. If audiences respond positively to revenge stories featuring female protagonists, dozens more are commissioned.
The audience unknowingly becomes part of the creative process. Social media platforms have every incentive to encourage this. The longer users remain on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, the more advertisements they see and the more valuable those platforms become to advertisers. Their recommendation algorithms therefore reward content that keeps viewers glued to their screens.
Micro-dramas excel at exactly that. Industry analysts now report that some vertical-drama apps generate exceptionally high daily engagement, with Hollywood studios increasingly studying the format rather than dismissing it as a passing fad.
India, too, is becoming the next frontier. Mumbai has witnessed a surge in micro-drama production aimed at Hindi and regional-language audiences. Industry estimates suggest hundreds of titles are already in production as investors race to capture a market perfectly suited to India’s mobile-first population.
The resemblance to India’s long-running television soaps is unmistakable. Family feuds. Property disputes. Hidden heirs. Impossible romances. The only difference is that what once took six months to unfold on television now plays out in two hours of scrolling.
Traditional filmmakers should take note. Just as streaming disrupted cinema, vertical storytelling is disrupting streaming itself. This does not mean two-hour films will disappear. Nor will television serials. But a new generation is growing up consuming stories in 60-second instalments while commuting, standing in queues or waiting for coffee.
Attention spans have not necessarily become shorter. They have become fragmented. The smartphone has become the world’s most important cinema screen. The irony is that these productions are often mocked for their melodrama, exaggerated acting and predictable plots.
Yet that misses the point entirely. Their purpose is not artistic perfection. Their purpose is capturing attention and retention. Every second is engineered to prevent viewers from looking away. Every insult demands revenge. Every revelation promises another twist. Every cliffhanger invites another swipe.
The next time a Facebook Reel introduces a poor girl humiliated by a billionaire’s family or a cleaner secretly owning the company where he works, remember that you are not merely watching a cheap soap opera. You are witnessing the emergence of a new entertainment economy—one that has fused Hollywood storytelling, Chinese production efficiency, Silicon Valley algorithms and artificial intelligence into perhaps the most addictive form of digital entertainment yet invented.
In the battle for the world’s attention, the ten-second clip may prove more powerful than the two-hour movie. (IPA Service)
