How $30B Microdramas Reshape Vertical Streaming with Nathaniel Danziger, Founding Voice at SOS.

Welcome And Why It Matters

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 0:45

Lady Boss in Disguise, My Forbidden Alpha, Undercover Prison King. What the heck is a micro drama anyway? That's what today's conversation is all about with our very own Nathaniel Danziger. Welcome back to the Stave Streaming Podcast. If you're not already, make sure to smash that subscribe button wherever you're listening, wherever you're following along, follow. Make sure that you never miss an update this week. We're sitting down with Nathaniel Danziger as a follow-up to his piece out earlier this week behind the screens, what makes a micro drama possible? This on the back of the news that Peacock has partnered with a company called Real Shorts. And we're gonna learn about what all of that means. We're gonna learn about the industry of microdramas. It's something that you've probably seen in a headline here or there. What's really great about this conversation with Nathaniel and the accompanying piece that'll be linked at the top of the show notes is that Nathaniel had interviews with the crew guide, with a director of photography, a script assistant, and a makeup artist who all work on microdramas. So we're gonna go behind the scenes on what makes a micro drama possible. Enjoy. Nathaniel, you've been covering vertical streaming, which is a shifting theme for us. And this month you you went deep on a topic that we've definitely covered as a headline. It's it's been a nugget. There's certainly news about them, but I gotta be honest, I didn't know what a micro drama is until your piece came across the desk. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Thank you so much for having me, Tim. It's a pleasure to join you. Yeah, I I was kind of in the same boat. They were something where I had just kind of heard of them, you know, they just kind of floated around as a term that just kept popping up. And so seeing when the thing that made me write it was a deal agreed to by Peacock and Real Short to bring some of Real Short's content library over to Peacock, which kind of made me be like, okay, this is

What Counts As A Micro Drama

SPEAKER_01 2:47

becoming something a little bit more serious, something I should dig into. And so that's how we ended up with the article.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 2:53

That's how we ended up with the article. And that is a that's good intuition to take Peacock. Real short, Real Short wasn't a company that I knew by name again before your piece, but since 2018, it it seems like micro dramas have been a growing industry. What did you find?

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Yeah, so around 2018, like you said, starting on a Chinese social network company called Doyin, which is kind of the Chinese alternative to TikTok, they just started releasing different really short series with around one to two minutes an episode with almost 50 to 60 episodes per series, you could call them. And these eventually grew out of China into South Korea, out of South Korea, into America, and is now going from America over to Europe. And it's it's kind of grown into a $30 billion industry very quickly. So since 2018, it's been on a steady growth trend up.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 3:46

Crazy. So if I understand it correctly, these are kind of bite-sized, episodic, professionally produced, high-quality content that is

How Micro Dramas Went Global

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 3:56

intentionally designed for mobile phone vertical consumption. Is that like a sterile definition of what a micro drama is?

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Absolutely. So the one problem I did run into is that they're new enough to where there isn't a defined, you know, sort of set of rules that make up a micro drama. They exist in this sort of weird middle space. So the Nev Edition I came up with was they're short, they're on the backs of flashy storylines. There's constant cliffhangers at the end of every episode to entice viewers to swipe over to the next one. And there's a constant exactly. And then the also other thing is that they're not the highest quality content. Not to say that there can't be high quality short form dramas, which is a burgeoning thing, which I talk about as well, but it's a lot of these, especially on real shorts, and I talk about this in a little bit of a piece, they they opt for quantity and not quality. And so if we look at their story beats page, which is kind of going over all their streaming options and all the different series that are available, there's around 15, 10 series per page, and then there's a total of 284 pages.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 4:59

There's there's more pages since your piece. We're gonna have to update there's 308 pages. Okay. Just about on the last page, there's I don't know what is this, five, but three hundred and seven pages have at least ten. So three oh seven times ten is three thousand and seventy times fifty episodes apiece.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Exactly. And so originally this piece was just gonna be about, you know, I was just gonna write about the deal, I was gonna talk about the rise of micro dramas. It wasn't I I didn't want to take it into an interview direction until I actually saw just the amount and the the quantity that was just on display here on these websites. And real shorts, the one that's being shown right now, is the predominant player in the space, but there are multiple others who also produce huge, huge libraries of content. And so what ended up happening was the longer I dug into this, the more I was just confused about how this was even possible. And so what ended up feeling like the best case of action was I went ahead and interviewed a sound operator, a director of photography, a script assistant, and a makeup artist who have all worked on these sorts of micro drama sets, and so they could give me a better idea about how

Scale, Libraries, And Quantity First

SPEAKER_01 6:14

these working conditions even enable this amount of content to be made because it is truly an unfathomable amount, even with the shorter times per episode.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 6:23

It's it it is mind-numbing to think about the amount of content, and it is it's a high quality production. It's a right, Peacock is is partnering with them. It's professionally produced content. I just want to read some of the titles here.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

I know we had it up on screen because no, please, because the titles themselves are a good insight into what exactly is on offer for some of these.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 6:46

What what what you could expect here and and for for our advertising

How The Work Gets Made

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 6:50

friends, uh, there's a term MFA made for advertising or made for advertising websites. Often just kind of think of them as the tabloids of the internet. This doesn't feel too far removed. Let's see, my hot firefighter ex-boyfriend, my billionaire husband doesn't remember me, clubhouse of desire. Like honestly, reading some of the titles, it makes you a little bit uncomfortable. I I I gotta imagine that your interviews, your conversations with the folks that work on the sets were enlightening, interesting, if nothing else.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

Yeah, incredibly. What did you find quoted saying all of them are done in the cheapest, most efficient way possible? Uh the script assistant says most people aren't happy working on them. The director of photography talks about how small the crew sizes is, even compared to an indie. And then the one that really got to me personally, and there's there's kind of one answer for all these questions that really stuck out to me. And the one for this one was definitely from the makeup artist who talked about how on one shoot they were on, it was so poorly put together that the costume designer was stressed out enough for the actors to actually start stealing clothes for the production. And you know, it's it's a little ridiculous when you say it out loud.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 8:32

Criminal activity to to even make the micro drama a thing.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Exactly, yes. And so it's interesting, it's to the level of poor planning where not only can things not happen, laws have to be broken for anything to be able to put on screen. And so it's this sort of ridiculous hodgepodge of really impressive talent being given very little support and getting paid as little as possible. And so it's this weird mix where people kind of have to take the job, obviously. And it's one of those things where you obviously don't go into movie making and entertainment just because you think it's gonna be an easy making money gig. But these are really on another level in terms of the type of pay they offer and then the amount of work they require for the gig themselves.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 9:18

And we the the lawyers are gonna make me come back and read a disclaimer. We're not suggesting that the peacock deal has anything to do with any of the conditions that we're describing. Insert legal footer here. This is these are general broad stroke insights about the category overall, right? We're talking about this right.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

So the people I'm a global perspective, these are all real short is the one I use just to talk about the total amount of you know it quantifies kind of how much is there, yeah, for sure. But there are many companies doing this across multiple different media platforms, and so this is not a channeling on any one of them. It's very much broad strokes, general sentiment that I've gotten from people who have worked on multiples of these sets.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 10:06

And I think it's important to call out because for us, our core audience are media buyers, these are folks who are running advertising, and we want to create that level of transparency of here's the good, the bad, and the ugly of what your brand could be positioned next to or against, or right, it sounds really exciting, and maybe there are formats, maybe it makes sense on a on a direct basis, or understanding really that's that's the important thing that we want to get across here is is a high-agency understanding of what it is that we're advertising against. So the working environment on the sets, a little bit sketchy. The next question in your piece do people enjoy the stories, the storylines themselves? Yeah, doesn't seem like we're making this for the artistic quality, but maybe I'm wrong.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

It's interesting. The point you just made actually was a perfect lead-in. So the the quotes I have here, and these were part of the general sentiment, which is absolutely not. These people are not enjoying getting these, these aren't projects that people go home and get to really feel good putting on their wheels. Grandma's not getting a call that she worked on my grandmother's secret billionaire boyfriend. You know, it's not it's not something that happened. That's fair. That's however, you know, there was one example where someone told me they worked for

Melodrama, Cliffhangers, And Titles

SPEAKER_01 11:25

a major streaming company that was doing one, and they did a very well thought out, queer-centric storyline that she said she was very proud to have worked on, which was great, and I was very happy for them. But it was very interesting to hear the general sentiment, which was these stories are just not the quality that is required, I would say, in any other type of production. So the the big one.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 11:48

I'm not putting it in my portfolio.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

I'm not exactly on the reels for different jobs, it's not anything you really want to advertise. And then the one, like all the all the quotes I got are just talking about how metal dramatic they are, how just this constant insistence on keeping drama pushing so people swipe on to the next episode on TikTok or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts or whatever it is, is so intense that the quote that I really love from this one is they're one run away from pornography in the vein of soap operas, just emphasize salacious content, excuse me. And truthfully, after hearing that and then going back onto the real shorts content page, it felt hard to disagree with with some of that classification to say the least.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 12:29

Nathaniel, I have and admittedly, I can I have I keep I have shoeboxes of receipts for all sorts of different stuff, but I have the screenshots of this a few years ago. My son was playing just like a Tetris style game on an iPad that that we have, and he said, Dad, what what is this? Like he had gotten this ad and he was confused by it, and he was eight, nine years old at the time. And I took the iPad and I looked at it, and that's genuinely what I thought. I was I thought, oh my gosh, how is this content being served as an ad

Brand Safety And Kids Seeing Ads

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 13:05

at all? How is this being served as an ad to a child and working in advertising? I immediately clicked the little three dots in the ad privacy to figure out like where is this coming from? And now it was it was seeing your your piece that I realized those were those were trailers for microdramas, those were those were I they they were jarring enough to me that I flagged them as pornographic content.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

They were trailers for microdramas. And it's it's good to keep in mind that it's not like TikTok or YouTube shorts or Instagram reels does a great job of age verification. And so any of these YouTube shorts any of these shorts could be pushed out to any like children or young adults, you know, like who may or may not be suited for it. And so it's a weird conundrum that the industry finds itself in in terms of content where you want to be next to it, because you never know what you're truly going to be next to if you attach to one of these things.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 13:58

Were there any bright spots? I don't want to make it I don't want to make it all doom and gloom, but were there any bright spots in the micro drama research that you did, or did it seem like there's this one, you know, category of microdramas that's especially prone to it?

SPEAKER_01 14:14

It's interesting because, like I said, when I talked to one of them, like a story kept coming up of working on multiple LGBTQIA and queer-centered stories that seem to have been a little bit more thought out, a little bit better planned. And so I don't know if that was just because of the one company that she was working for that was doing them, or if it was because the directors themselves or the writers themselves, you know. So there are definitely bright spots. And the director of photography I worked with spends a lot of time doing short form content in other ways. And so there are lots of very cool stories to tell and filming techniques that can be used. And he he

Bright Spots In Vertical Storytelling

SPEAKER_01 14:49

went on record saying that as well, which is you know, there's a lot of really cool things you can accomplish in a vertical composition that you can't in horizontal, and for that in itself, I think it's it's a good medium to exist, but the micro drama in its existence right now as a form of entertainment is inherently a step below, it feels, if that makes sense.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 15:11

It makes perfect sense, and I think it's a great segue into what was your closing question in the piece. What does the future of the industry look like regarding microdramas? What did you what did you learn?

SPEAKER_01 15:24

I mean, it's it's a lot of fear, and I think that makes a lot of sense because these microdramas are showing that you can make super cheap, super not professional a lot of the time looking stuff. And that's not to say due to the talent of anyone working on set, it's due to the time constraints and the budget constraints and the energy constraints, you know. I have full confidence that on any one of these micro drama sets, that exact group of people could put together a phenomenal movie, a phenomenal television show. It really is just the fact

The Future: AI And Career Paths

SPEAKER_01 15:54

that they have all these constraints put on them due to the scheduling, which you know really makes you speed up filming, and the budget, which really makes you cut out the things that make a film look good. And so when I think about the future of the industry, everybody kept talking about the fear that these sorts of things would sort of not only take over the normal filmmaking practices, so to speak, but also just one of them brought up a very interesting point, which is you know, not only do people worry about the acting and microdramas with how AI is coming back up and affecting the process, not only are people worried about production quality going lower across the board because this is lowering the bar for everybody, but the other really scary thing that came up is there doesn't really seem to be a pathway from working on these sorts of microdramas to larger sets. And so that's one thing that was exciting to me hearing the Peacock deal is in my head it makes sense if you're within the peacock umbrella, you work on a micro drama, you move up to a series TV, and then you move up to a movie or something like that. And so there does seem to be a bright spot there, but it scares me a little bit just because it did seem to be very scary for everyone else, just about the fact that if you get caught up in this circle of micro drama production, it's hard to break out of it and get a different type of job. And so the future of the industry does look like it won't be completely shaped by microdramas, they're not gonna they're not gonna take away the movie, nobody's gonna stop making TV shows because microdramas are a thing. But it will take some of that lower demand talent that maybe can't get a better job at the moment to maybe have to sacrifice some of their real to get enough money to pay rent. And so it's it's a scary time for sure. Wow.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 17:34

Thank you so much for doing the work. Thank you to the the folks that were willing to participate and give you that feedback and share those insights with the audience. We're going to make sure that this is linked right at the top of the show notes for today's conversation. And it sounds like we'll we'll be expecting to hear more about the micro drama trend, vertical streaming in general. Nathaniel, if folks want to connect with you, where are you most active on socials? Where should they go?

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Y'all can find me on LinkedIn and on Twitter and underscore Danziger and Nathaniel Danziger on LinkedIn. Always welcome to reach out. I would love to speak to you if you have any thoughts or ideas about the topic.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 18:10

Excellent. Nathaniel, thank you so much. Thank you for being a contributor, being a founding contributor to State of Streaming. We're excited to share all of this great content with our audience. If you found this conversation to be helpful, please share it with a colleague or a client. Start a conversation yourself

Where To Find Nathaniel

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 18:24

today. And we'll see y'all next time.