Obs.

Vertical Drama Today: No Paid Traffic, No Revenue

Most international filmmakers and screenwriters glance at the vertical-drama boom and assume the platforms are starving for “great…

Real Reel™

15 Jul 2025 — 3 min read

Most international filmmakers and screenwriters glance at the vertical-drama boom and assume the platforms are starving for “great stories.” Spend even a week inside one of these companies, however, and a harsher truth appears: without paid traffic, the money stops.

Some numbers make the logic hard to argue with:

In the first three months of 2025, short-drama apps booked almost US $700 million in in-app-purchase revenue, nearly four times the haul from the same period last year. ReelShort alone now claims, about 50 million monthly active users, each buying a handful of micro-payments (“coins”) to unlock 90-second episodes. Those users don’t just wander in. User-acquisition teams bombard Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram with bite-sized ads; AppGrowing’s March report shows ad volume for ReelShort-type apps jumping 40 percent month-over-month, enough to put them among the three most aggressive advertisers in the world that month.

BUYING viewers costs real money.

Industry trackers place CPI — cost per install — between about US $1.50 and US $4.00 worldwide, a little cheaper in Latin America, a little dearer in North America. To keep that math sustainable, every drama script the platform commissions must supply raw ammunition for the marketing cannon: 30-second clips packed with slaps, betrayals, and forbidden kisses that turn curious scrollers into paying users. Inside the company they call these clips “materials.”

That demand reshapes the way a writer’s work is judged. A typical green-light meeting begins not with character arcs but with two questions:

Can we carve half a dozen irresistible ad moments out of your first ten episodes?
Where does the very first paywall hit?

Metrics, not muscles, define success:

CTR (click-through rate) — What share of viewers who see the ad actually tap it?
CVR (conversion rate) — Of those tappers, how many spend at least once?
ROI (return on investment) — Do those payments outweigh the ad spend?
LTV (lifetime value)— How much, in total, will that payer spend before churning?

As long as ad costs stay lower than LTV, the flywheel spins: buy users → earn IAP (in-app-purchase) revenue → plow the cash back into more ads. But the wheel is wobbling. Clip formats and tropes, such like secret pregnancies, domineering CEOs, are already looking samey, which pushes CTR down and CPI up. Analysts now predict the category will still pass US $2 billion in annual revenue this year, but only if platforms keep finding cheaper markets or fresher bait.

Why an “IP strategy” is the next frontier?

That is why executives have started talking less about clips and more about IP — intellectual property that can live beyond one paid-traffic cycle. The logic is simple:

A repeatable world lowers acquisition costs. When a show like The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband racks up hundreds of millions of views and then launches a spin-off, the sequel can piggy-back on the same fan base. Every returning viewer reduces average CPI.
Falcons, not firecrackers. If a premise can produce novels, podcasts, or even a traditional TV adaptation, its revenue stream widens beyond short-form micro-payments.
Organic reach appears. A title with recognizable characters invites memes, fan edits, press think-pieces. That earned media means fewer dollars spent on ads.

What this means for international writers?

If you want to write an vertical-drama for existing platform today, you are effectively offering two products at once:

A highlight reel. Your first 8–10 episodes still need those surgical “ad hooks” — single scenes that can shock, titillate, or cliff-hang with zero context.
A universe. Show how the same premise could spawn a prequel, spin-off, or audio series. Name the dangling mysteries, the side characters who could headline their own arcs, the merchandising images that could live on webtoons or T-shirts.

When you combine both, you meet the platform where it is now: hungry for cheap, effective traffic, while steering it toward where it has to go next: owning franchises that survive even when the ad bids get too expensive.

I’d love to keep the conversation going. If you’re wrestling with a vertical-drama concept, curious about IP strategy, or just want to swap war stories from the writers’ room, drop me a line.

You can also find me on Twitter at @realreel_shu