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Good morning - Michael here, writing from the frontlines of Massif & Kroo: Here's what you need to pay attention to in media today:

That's the reported year-over-year growth in vertical drama revenues — the minute-long, phone-first shows that are quietly becoming one of the fastest-growing entertainment formats in the world. And if you haven't heard of them yet, you will. Because they're about to be everywhere.

Let me explain what these are, because they sound ridiculous until you understand why they work.

Imagine a TV show, but every episode is 45 to 90 seconds long. Shot vertically, for your phone. Each episode ends on a cliffhanger that makes you physically unable to stop swiping. The first few episodes are free. Then you pay to keep watching — usually a few cents per episode, sometimes a small subscription. Same monetization model as mobile games: give them a taste, then charge for the next hit.

They're called microdramas, and they've been described as "the sort of thing you'd watch drunk at 2am." That's meant to be dismissive, but it's actually the point. These aren't prestige television. They're engineered for the exact moment when you're lying in bed, half-asleep, thumb still moving. And that moment — multiply it by hundreds of millions of phones — turns out to be worth a lot of money.

The US market for microdramas outside China is projected to reach about $1.5 billion by the end of this year, according to Omdia. That's roughly half of the global microdrama market outside China. A year ago, most people in Hollywood hadn't even heard the word. Now Los Angeles is exploring a $5 million subsidy program for microdrama production because the format is generating enough work to matter for soundstages and crew jobs.

The reason this matters goes way beyond one format. Microdramas are the sharpest expression of something much bigger: vertical video is no longer just "social media content." It's becoming the default shape of entertainment.

Instagram is testing a redesign that opens directly into Reels by default. Not your feed. Not your DMs. Reels. The entire app is being rebuilt around vertical video as the primary experience. And it's not staying on your phone — Instagram Reels just rolled out on Google TV, which means vertical video is now being piped into living rooms.

Netflix is redesigning its mobile app around the same idea. Leadership has talked openly about a 2026 mobile revamp that includes a vertical video feed — clips from shows, trailers, and potentially other formats — all designed to compete with the scroll behavior that TikTok trained into an entire generation of viewers.

TikTok itself is treating microdramas as a real content category, not a trend. It quietly launched a standalone app called PineDrama — essentially TikTok, but only scripted stories, one-minute episodes, built for binge-scrolling. That's TikTok saying: this format is big enough to deserve its own product.

And on the supply side, AI is accelerating everything. Google's latest Veo update added native vertical video generation — 9:16 format, aimed directly at Shorts and TikTok-style content. Which means more vertical content, produced faster and cheaper, flooding every platform simultaneously.

The winning unit of content is no longer a "show" or even a "video." It's a loop. Hook the viewer in the first two seconds. Hold them with a cliffhanger. Push them to the next swipe. Repeat. When that loop works, it's addictive — in the literal, behavioral sense of the word. And every major platform is now designing around it.

Streaming used to compete with streaming. Netflix versus HBO versus Disney Plus. That competition still exists, but it's not the main event anymore. The real competition is between traditional entertainment and what you might call TikTok brain — the expectation that content should be instant, vertical, and endless. Netflix isn't redesigning its mobile app because it thinks vertical video is artistically superior. It's doing it because people trained on short-form scroll behavior are bouncing off the old interface.

Late last year, Hollywood executives were openly chasing a "Netflix for vertical" — and calling it a production gold rush. That's not hype. That's an industry watching $1.5 billion materialize in a format that didn't meaningfully exist 18 months ago and trying to figure out how to not get left behind.

There's a real question about what this means for storytelling, for attention spans, and for the economics of making anything that takes longer than a minute to appreciate. Those are fair concerns. But the direction of the money is not ambiguous. Vertical, short, looped, and engineered to keep you swiping — that's where the growth is. And the platforms, the studios, and the advertisers are all building for it right now.

They stopped competing with each other long enough to team up against a common problem: AI companies taking their journalism without asking or paying.

They formed a coalition called SPUR — Standards for Publisher Usage Rights. The idea behind it is pretty simple. Right now, AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are trained on millions of news articles. When you ask one of those tools a question, it can give you an answer that's basically built from reporting that journalists did — but you never see the original article, the newsroom never gets paid, and the AI company never asked permission.

That's what these publishers want to change. Not by blocking AI entirely, but by creating a set of shared rules: if you want to use our work, here's how you get a license, here's what you pay, and here's how you give credit. The FT's CEO called it a "NATO for news" — the idea being that one publisher alone doesn't have enough leverage, but five of the biggest names in journalism standing together might.

They're inviting newsrooms from around the world to join, because this isn't just a UK problem. It's happening everywhere, and the fight over whether AI companies owe publishers anything is going to be one of the defining media battles of the next few years. If you've ever gotten an answer from an AI tool that sounded like it came straight from a news article you never clicked on — this is the industry's response to that exact experience.

Ryan Coogler's Southern Gothic vampire film took home the award for best ensemble cast, and its star Michael B. Jordan won best actor, beating out Timothée Chalamet in what almost everyone considered an upset. That matters because SAG voters — actors — make up the largest voting bloc in the Academy. When they pick a winner, it tends to ripple.

Coogler also made history: he's now the first director to have two films win the ensemble prize, after "Black Panther" took it in 2018.

Going into Sunday, "One Battle After Another" from Paul Thomas Anderson had been sweeping everything: the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, critics awards. "Sinners" looked like the underdog with momentum but no trophies to prove it. Now it has two major ones, plus a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations — the most any film has ever received.

There's a media angle here worth flagging too. The ceremony itself — Hollywood's biggest night for actors — streamed live on Netflix. Not broadcast TV. Not cable. Netflix. A few years ago, that would've been unthinkable. And the film that won? It's from Warner Bros., the studio that Paramount just agreed to buy for $110 billion. So Netflix hosted the show, and the new Paramount-WBD empire walked away with four of the six film awards. The Oscars are March 15, and for the first time in months, no one's sure what's going to win.

YOUR NEXT MOVE: Build for the loop, not the post. If you're a creator, a brand, or anyone making content for screens, the playbook is shifting under your feet.

Stop thinking in terms of individual videos. Start thinking in terms of micro-series — 10 to 30 episodes, each ending with a hard turn that makes the next one impossible to skip.

Engineer the first two seconds like your life depends on it, because algorithmically, it does. And plan distribution like a feed war: cut vertical-first, then repackage for every surface — Reels, Shorts, TikTok, TV apps, and now even streamer feeds.

If your strategy still treats vertical video as bonus content you cut from the "real" version, you're building for a screen that's already losing attention. The real version is the vertical one now. Everything else is the repackage.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you tomorrow.

Feedback, thoughts, suggestions? Hit the reply!

Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company, a permanent-capital firm focused on building category-defining companies across business, media (owner of Massif & Kroo), aviation, and impact. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation. Now he builds permanent-capital companies focused on long-term trends that compound over decades. Based in Arlington, Virginia.

Connect: mikewildes.com | [email protected]

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