Maybe Quibi Wasn’t Crazy: ‘Vertical Series’ Ventures Draw Small but Growing Audience

Maybe Jeffrey Katzenberg was just ahead of his time.

A cottage industry of apps has found market momentum this year offering scripted short-form entertainment for mobile consumption, not unlike the kind of content the Hollywood mogul infamously crashed and burned with via his Quibi venture in 2020.

Multiple outlets have recently noted the emergence of “vertical series” apps (also known as “short” or “micro” or “mini” dramas). These are movie-length shows broken into dozens of bite-size episodes, often two minutes or less each, designed to be watched on your phone in a 16:9 aspect ratio.

The format started gaining popularity in China around 2020, but it was ReelShort — founded by Silicon Valley-based Crazy Maple Studios, whose investors include China’s COL Group, in 2022 — that introduced the rest of the world to vertical series with its TikTok-viral show “Fated to My Forbidden Alpha.” From there, numerous vertical series platforms, including DramaBox, ShortTV and Ullu, emerged (primarily out of China) to launch bite-size and phone-friendly shows of their own.

As for what the vertical series market looks like today, app analytics company Appfigures found that short drama apps totaled around 37 million downloads in Q1 2024, with some 84% coming from just the top three apps (ReelShort, ShortTV and DramaBox). Vertical series are still mainly popular in Asia, but Appfigures also noted the U.S. was the biggest revenue-generating market for all 10 top platforms during this period.

That total might not seem significant compared with the big players — TikTok had 137 million downloads in the same period — but the 992% increase from 3.4 million in Q1 2023 to 37 million one year later shows serious momentum. The New York Times even found ReelShort briefly outpaced TikTok in iOS App Store downloads last November.

Further context on the relative scale of this newish genre of video comes via data tracking firm MIDG, which found that the top six most used vertical series apps accumulated 462,020 minutes from U.S. consumers in March 2024. That made up only 0.0002% of time spent across social video, streaming, gaming and other entertainment formats in March.

Still, not only does the vertical series world have plenty of room to grow, but its distinctly younger audiences might help sustain that growth. For viewing in March, MIDG noted that 49% and 26% of U.S.-based vertical series consumption came from Millennials and Gen Z, respectively. For reference, social video viewing for the same period was comprised of 19% Millennials and 25% Gen Z.

So the industry is growing and there’s money to be made. Appfigures found that the number of vertical series apps globally available on the App Store and Google Play more than tripled between Q1 2023 and 2024, while consumer spending on the category skyrocketed from $1.8 million to $146 million over the same period — an 8,000% increase.

If the concept of short-form, phone-friendly TV programming sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the trail unsuccessfully blazed by Quibi during the streaming app’s eight months of existence in 2020. The $1.75 billion startup founded by Katzenberg was so sure its 4-to-10-minute, phone-exclusive shows were the future of entertainment it thought “Quibi” would be the catch-all word for short video much as “Google” is for search engines.

But that reality was gone in a Quibi for the ill-fated video platform, with Katzenberg and then-CEO Meg Whitman citing financial strain and the pandemic as the deciding factors behind the shutdown. But even before Quibi shuttered, the platform and its content were panned by critics and ridiculed by the online masses.

Aside from the vertical play and short runtimes, this new generation of vertical TV bears little resemblance to Quibi’s content. Whereas Quibi relied on A-list stars and familiar IP to bring in subscribers, ReelShort and its ilk churn out low-budget shows that bank on campy premises, rather than its casts of unknown actors, to turn heads.

Quibi wanted its titles to have the sheen and prestige of Hollywood productions, but shows such as “Never Divorce a Secret Billionaire Heiress” and hammy premises including “soap opera with werewolves” embrace their B-movie-esque scruffiness.

But the biggest difference comes down to how audiences pay for the content. Quibi went with the typical streaming subscription model, charging either $4.99 a month with ads or $7.99 ad-free. That model placed Quibi in direct competition with more robust streaming platforms like Netflix, whose basic subscription tier was $8.99 in 2020.

ReelShort and DramaBox instead employ an “à la carte” approach, offering a handful of episodes for free and allowing users to pay for the rest at their leisure. The more shows these apps release, the more in-app spending grows.

Vertical series are still an emerging entertainment form, and the existing audience might have proven too small for Quibi’s ambitions anyway. But if the medium’s leading platforms can keep up the current propulsion, we just might see the vertically dominated entertainment world Quibi envisioned in the (likely far off) future.