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Why not watch it? https://youtube.com/shorts/1AFtTGoNuJw?si=L3620ddzB7os2TXL
Six hours. One minute of content. But let me back up, because understanding why I'm chasing this format is as important as the "how."
My older brother, Stan, was a bully. Not the garden-variety kind; the kind who locked me in a closet for hours when our parents weren't home, broke my front tooth, and once left a message on my answering machine saying if I ever came back to Escondido, he'd kill me. My parents adored him. He was handsome, charming, and a terrific liar.
I was the gangly, stuttering, big-eared little sister who "bruised easy" and "ran into things a lot," but I was smarter and knew how to hide from him.
When I started writing my Wilma Wallaby, I gave her the older brother I survived. Winston is 14, smug, and utterly convinced he runs the house when their parents aren't around. Wilma is 13, brilliant, and Wilma has spent her entire life training to outsmart him. The series opens with her crammed into a hotel closet after overhearing a murder plot. Her survival instincts aren't metaphorical. They're earned.
I wrote what I know. And now I'm trying to get it on your phone.
If you haven't heard of vertical series, also called "micro dramas" or short dramas, you're about to. These are scripted shows filmed in 9:16 portrait orientation, designed to be watched on your phone. Each episode runs 60 to 90 seconds and ends on a cliffhanger.
The numbers are genuinely jaw-dropping. Consumer spending on short drama apps grew from $1.8 million in Q1 2023 to nearly $700 million in Q1 2025 — an 8,000% increase in two years. U.S. revenues hit $819 million in 2024 and are projected to reach $3.8 billion by 2030. This is not a fad. It's a new entertainment category, and the race to own it is very much on.
Most of the content right now is aimed squarely at women 45–65, and the titles tell you everything: My Billionaire Secret Husband, The Heiress He Underestimated, Fated to My Forbidden Alpha. Werewolves and CEOs and secret inheritance reveal scenes. It's a soap opera on steroids, and people are absolutely watching it.
Which brings me to the opportunity hiding in plain sight: virtually nobody is making this for teens and middle-grade audiences. That market is almost entirely untouched.
I took a Stage32 webinar from Ramo Law last month, and I've been studying the deal landscape: it's truly the Wild West! Here are the big three - and there are dozens more!
ReelShort (https://reelslink.com/cps/bTLd7R) is the category-defining platform — the one that put vertical series on the map in the West. It's owned by Crazy Maple Studio, a Silicon Valley company launched in August 2022. Their breakout hit, The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband, has over 500 million views. ReelShort generated approximately $400 million in revenue in 2024 and is aiming to produce 400 shows in 2026. Their monetization model is ad-supported; watching ads unlocks about six episodes every 24 hours, plus coin bundle purchases. The core audience is adult women, and most of their catalog reflects that, but their animated series Next Door Spy https://reelslink.com/cps/bTLd7R hints they're at least experimenting with younger audiences. Deal terms are closely guarded by NDAs, but producers typically receive a flat licensing fee, estimated at $5,000 to $50,000 per series, depending on exclusivity, territory, and track record, with more established creators negotiating back-end participation and IP retention. The standard window is a two-year exclusive license. After that, rights can revert or be renegotiated.
DramaBox is ReelShort's closest competitor, with $323 million in revenue and $10 million in net profit in 2024 — and notably, they're actively expanding beyond the adult romance lane. Business Insider reported that DramaBox has explicitly stated its ambition to move into family content, choose-your-own-adventure formats, and kids animation, and the company landed in Disney's 2025 Accelerator Program with plans to adapt children's IP for the format. They've also opened a New York office. For a female-led, family-friendly animated mystery series, DramaBox may actually be the better first call for me than ReelShort right now.
FlareFlow is the newest platform I'm watching, and it's a sleeper. Owned by COL Group (the same parent as ReelShort), FlareFlow launched in April 2025 and, within weeks, hit the Top 5 Entertainment apps on Google Play and the Top 8 on the U.S. App Store. It crossed 10 million downloads in three months across 177 countries. Because it's actively building its catalog from scratch, it may be more open to genre experimentation than the established platforms. New platforms need content; content creators need distribution. That simple math might produce me a better deal.
For me? I tend to be overenthusiastic, so doing a query to all three this month. The development process outlined in the Stage32/RAMO Law vertical series webinar is useful here: come in with 2-3 episodes written and a complete series outline. The platforms can immediately tell whether a script was conceived for the vertical format or whether it's a feature screenplay that got "chopped up." My Wilma Wallaby vertical series was written specifically for this format — every scene is designed for close quarters, faces, hands, closets, and theme park crowds. That's an advantage.
For most companies, production budgets run $50,000 to $300,000 per season in the U.S. Lead actors currently earn $600 to $1,000 per day. And some series — not all, but the breakout hits — pull in $2 million a week in micropayment revenue from viewers unlocking episodes. What's my secret ingredient? I'm both the creator and producer with my company, SmilingEagle. I'm using modern AI animation tools. No actors, no writers, just me. I can produce an episode for free and all in the time it takes to drink a ginger ale, once I get going.
Here's what I didn't fully anticipate: the learning curve is steep. I'm suffering from high-altitude sickness because it was so steep!!! Producing a vertical episode isn't just writing. It's voiceover direction. I'm using ElevenLabs AI voices. I'm recording my own sound for the metallic clanging, door slamming, the toilet flush and the thudding footsteps. Everything is scripted down to the specific cue. I'm doing my own subtitle formatting, timing, and pacing up to the final cliffhanger frame. Episode One is 60 seconds. Yup, it took me 6 hours to make a 60-second video, and before that, over six months of learning 4-5 different software tools. But, being a former programmer and technology company owner, it was possible.
AND here's the thing — it's done. I learned how to do this. It exists. I spent the past 60 days creating a "system" to make this easy for me. I call it Development Notes. And now that the pipeline is built, I expect future episodes will take about four hours each. Once I hook up with a platform, I'll find out their "rules" for the 9:16 landscape, exports, etc., and since I have 2 more episodes in Season One ready to produce, I'll time it and calculate the time for the other 57 episodes. My guess is 30-60 days for the whole season, and it will be done by summer.
Then, I have the Wilma Wallaby Jazz Jinx and Drugged Ducks books ready for Seasons Two and Three. I'm writing book 4, Kidnapped Kangaroo, in my free time. Then there are two more full series: Kira and Henry, with 4 books published and Carmen and Cypher with book 2 ready to publish.
I should be busy for years, and I only have to wait for…. me! Unlike my technology company - I'm everything; writer, producer, director, talent - all in one. The shocking thing is the results. I've had a YouTube channel for years, and my typical video gets around 50-100 views. Over the years, I've created 128 videos and have about 100,000 total views. But this little movie had over two hundred views in the first few hours! Yes, I have one video with 28K views, but it is about "packing light," and I have to think it probably gets forwarded way too much by the half of a marriage that thinks the other person packs way too much! I can't wait to see how many total views this little movie gets after a month.
The teen and middle-grade market for vertical series is, right now, almost entirely wide open. Wilma Wallaby is a 13-year-old girl detective in suburban Florida who uses her survival skills — skills she earned outsmarting her bully of a brother- to solve real crimes. She's funny, she's dry, she speaks directly to the camera, and she makes the audience her partner in every case. That's the kind of character vertical series needs more of.
The question isn't whether this format has a future. It clearly does - AND... my YA and middle-grade market is mostly untouched… AND it will help sell my books! It is a win-win-win, and I'm ready for the Wild West!
Binge-read the full Wilma series here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FRST9BLT and be sure to Follow me as an author on Amazon! https://www.amazon.com/stores/Sandi-Jerome/author/B0DHL94PTT
