Endless Thread - Love in 60 Seconds

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Wanda Brewer was grieving. After losing her brother, she found comfort in an unexpected place: a soap-opera-esque story on Instagram told in 60-second increments. The story? A mafia boss torn between power, family and love. Wanda’s not alone. Millions are bingeing these bite-sized, ultra-dramatic vertical shorts, where sexy werewolves, ruthless billionaires, and love triangles unfold one minute at a time — hooking viewers with cliffhangers and high-stakes drama. From China’s multi-billion-dollar booming industry to your TikTok feed, these soapy, over-the-top dramas are changing the way we watch — and pay for — entertainment. This Valentine’s Day, Endless Thread explores the rise and Americanization of vertical short dramas. Show notes: “Werewolf Billionaire CEO Husbands Are Taking Over Hollywood” (Rolling Stone) “Minute-Long Soap Operas Are Here. Is America Ready?” (The New York Times) “2024 Short Drama Overseas Marketing White Paper” (TikTok) Credits: This episode was produced by Cici Yu. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski and Paul Vaitkus.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from The Nature Conservancy. This show tells climate stories like a stubborn optimist, because hope, innovation, and nature itself are key. to solving the challenges ahead. Follow on your favorite podcast app. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Shmammary. Schmend. Happy Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentine's Day. I feel like we've always marked the occasion in some way on this show, right? Yeah. Last year we spoke to the guy who went viral for delivering a PowerPoint presentation about the movie Tenet on a first date.

You know, I just printed the slides. It's only like 29 slides. And then before that was the Canadian girlfriend story. I really did have a girlfriend who lived in Canada. There was also the Sleeping Beauty proposal story. Remember that? Oh my God, I think someone's going to get engaged today. I wonder who it is.

And who could forget? Describe our relationship in one wrestling move. The first thing that came to mind was Gator Roll. Gator Roll. This year, CCU, Endless Threads production fellow emeritus. Yes, nice to see you guys again. She has a very fitting story for us, involving some wild, high-drama love stories. Help!

Somebody help me! Hey! Get your hands off my wife! Yeah, so recently I have been chatting with my close friends from college about their post-grat life. Cici is Chinese, and so are these friends. she was catching up with. But unlike CeC, her friends are working as crew members

in the film industry. But this is not the film industry that you are thinking of, like not a traditional film industry. They are working in vertical shorts. When you say vertical shorts to me, I think of a piece of clothing. But this is not that.

Not. This is... What is this? What's vertical shorts? What does that mean? Vertical short dramas or verticals or micro dramas, they have so many names. They're like usually under two minutes, sometimes like one minutes. Okay.

And they are usually about love story, romance story, or story about vampire revenge or conflicts in wealthy family. Or all three combined, potentially? Oh, yeah, sometimes. In 60 seconds? Well, each episode is 60 seconds to like 100. Like 120 seconds. But the whole series has maybe around 60 to 100 episodes. Whoa.

So this is like a massive serialized, bite-sized story. Yes. You're really going to regret breaking up with me when you find out who I really am. You want me to tell your trust fund girl that you're single when you were actually cheating on me with her? Myler, when are you going to reveal your identity? When I find out what's really happening here. Wow. It's kind of crazy when you are thinking about, you know, just binge watching these kind of short reels on your phone all day.

Uh-huh. And you know what? And they're not free. You may first see it on Instagram and TikTok or other, like, social media because, you know, all these producing companies pay the advertisement money for exposure. Okay. But then after a few episodes, they will redirect you to their streaming platforms where you will need to pay. a subscription fee for a whole production, like a ho serious. So just so I'm understanding this, there's something called vertical shorts that are

like dramatized, serialized, miniature soap operas or soap operas that are cut into miniature pieces. You see that stuff on TikTok or Instagram. It gets its hooks into you, and you have to find out if the vampire lover... Leave you or not. Leaves you or not. leaves the extremely rich character or not. But you can't actually finish the series

unless you go to this other platform and pay a subscription fee. Yeah. Okay, C-C. We're talking about vampire lovers. Are vertical shorts porn? Some people call vertical shorts soft porn because they do show some intimate moments. Okay.

However, it is not porn in a traditional sense because there's no nudity. Okay. I have so many questions still, but I feel like maybe we should just watch an example of this. Now that I know that vertical shorts are relatively safe for work. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so this is an Instagram promo for a vertical shorts that one of my friends worked on during the summer. It's called Three Brothers Spoil Me.

Three Brothers Spoil Me. Ooh, wow. Interesting. I have a pop-up immediately that says, more from real short app. So it's like kind of it's advertised. We're engaged. We're even trying for a baby.

I'm not going to marry you. Oh my god, they're immediately in a fight. Handsome people are immediately in a fight. People of lower status should know their place. Whoa. Whoa. Someone just got... Kicked in the stomach.

There's a lot of drama in a very short. Ooh, a crystal necklace. Someone who separated from their birth family. This necklace was given to you before you were born. I guess it's my neckluck. Mom and dad left a safe for our sister, and only her fingerprints can unlock it. We've seen like 12 different characters. There's a guy holding a crystal necklace again?

There's blood now? Only a landcaster can summon the swan within it. Okay. She's summoning a swan. The production value is high. I have to say, like, all of the shots look very professional. And it seems to have a very big cat. Yes, I'm not sure how good of actors they are, but...

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of, it seems like, kind of, you described it as a soap opera, C.C. And that feels that, that's right. Yes, that's right, right. This is as soapy as it gets. Everything about it is over the top. Yeah, this feels... And people love them, because there are so many conflicts that make you continue to wash them and figure out what happened next. So you have a personal connection to this of some sort, obviously, C.C.

with these friends who work in the industry. But why is this interesting to you? So these cheesy, soapy, 60 seconds, vertical shorts are actually a multi-billion dollar industry, believe it or not. And we are not watching them, but many people are. So I'm just wondering, like, why are they watching them? Who are these people? Why they are so popular?

What does the popularity of Vertical Short tell us about the future of social media content and the future of Hollywood? All great questions. Amory, you ready to go long on vertical shorts? I am ready to summon a swan. Yes. I'm Amory Severson. I'm Ben Brock Weirwolf CEO Johnson, which doesn't make sense right now, but it will. And you're listening to Endless Threat.

Coming to you from WBUL. are Boston's NPR. Today's episode, Love in 60 Seconds. Love you too, Mr. Love. Why can't you just let me move on, huh? I gave up everything to be with you instead of someone my father wanted me to marry. Do you regret it? No. Okay, so here's what we know about this industry. It started in China. The first vertical short dramas appeared on Chinese social media platforms during the pandemic. Between 2021 and 2022, more than 3,000 series were produced.

By 2024, the vertical short market in China was valued at nearly $7 billion, with tens of thousands of production companies in the game. There has been 83,000 related companies that are registered in this area in China. So that's a really huge amount of practitioners. That's Shao Ting Yu. She's an investigator with the Digital Media Research Center at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Shao Ting's been researching vertical shorts in both the Chinese and overseas markets.

And according to the data she's been studying, there are currently more than 80 different streaming apps for vertical shorts. Things like Real Short, Drama Box, good short, short shorts. Okay, I made that one up. By the end of last year, they'd gotten 287 million downloads in overseas markets collectively,

bringing in another $500 million to the vertical shorts industry. So that brings us to the business model of the industry, because the apps themselves are generally free, but their content is not. Well, maybe the first five to ten episodes of a vertical short series are, but after that, you have to pay to unlock more by buying coins. Don't you love it when the digital world uses the quaint concept of the olden times like coins of the realm memory? I wouldn't want to pay to watch minute-long soap operas on my handheld supercomputer any other way, Ben.

All right, so let's talk numbers for one more minute. Take the most popular of these apps real short as an example. In this app, 500 coins costs $4.99. You get a free coin. Each episode costs anywhere from 30 to 110 coins to watch. So if you want to watch a 70 episode series... Yes, there are 70 episode vertical short series. You'd spend about $25 on the low end just for that one series.

It's like going to the movies. Or you could subscribe to the app's premium plan to get unlimited streaming access for the, say what, price of 1999. per week. Compare that to an ad-free Netflix subscription of 1799 per month. Man. But shouting you told us that the big money in the vertical shorts industry doesn't come from the weekly subscribers. It comes from those in-app coin buyers, the ones who are spending money one series or one episode at a time. That doesn't matter whether you are going to watch every episode, watch it in full lens. as long as you are so attracted to the first few minutes

and you're willing to pay for just micro-payment for the first few minutes, the money's back. Now, some American listeners out there might be thinking, wait a minute, didn't we have something like these vertical short streaming apps at some point? Well, you're probably thinking of Quibi. Quibi. Now, that's a name I have not heard in what feels like centuries. Long time. Quibi launched back in 2020. It was founded by Hollywood executives who wanted to offer high-budget short-form dramas that you could watch on mobile devices.

Quibi, interestingly, was based around a subscription model. That is another Ben, Ben Woods. He is a video and creator economy analyst working at Media Research, a research firm in London, focused on the digital content economy. But actually, we believe at media that actually the short form platforms are really, some gear much more towards a younger consumer. And these younger consumers don't really have the same kind of cash flow as an older consumer does. British Ben says when Quibi launched, people were using social media on their phones, of course, but they weren't heavily using their phones for entertainment purposes yet. But that's completely changed.

Social video platforms like TikTok are increasingly more about entertainment than they are about socializing. What we've also found is that there's a growing trend. It began as almost like a form of piracy of consumers uploading TV shows and movies onto the platform and then capturing the cultural imagination. And now you see people creating entertainment to be consumed specifically on phones. But the people consuming these mini melodramas are not who you might think. Who are they? That intel is going to cost you 10,000 coins.

Which costs you $99 and 99. Or you can just wait until after the break. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know.

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I thought they're incredibly cheesy and horrific. I was like horrified by the themes like vampires, alpha wolves, packs, my alpha male is my lover. Catherine Liu is a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. And when she first learned about vertical shorts, she had a particular image in her head of who was watching them. I thought maybe like older women would be the target audience. You know, it's kind of like the targeted audience of talk shows, like to mess or soap opera. I could lose everything.

It's all of it. I just don't want to lose you, Rachel. But Professor Liu has been studying the industry over the last few years, along with her students. And she's learned just how wrong she was. But in fact, the audience is much younger, 17 or 34. It's much more educated than you would think. It's like 40-60 male-female split. 40% men?

You can admit you like sexy werewolves, Ben. This is a safe space. I do wonder, though, as Professor Liu did, what these young, educated people get out of watching vertical shorts, you know? Like, what part of their brains or souls are these minisodes feeding? What we saw was that the fragmentation of time, the use of the cell phone, the shortening of attention spans, the toughness of the workday allows for a one-minute escape moment for people who have really complicated, fragmented time,

work schedules. This is terrifying to me, but that also makes sense to me. It's like why so many of us check social media in the bathroom, right? I'm not saying I do that. I'm just saying people. Never. I would do that. Never. Vertical shorts are just another way to spend those little mental breaks in our day.

They're quick. They are meant to make money. I mean, it's just unabashed about that. And they're escapist. For those 60 or so seconds, we're not just escaping our workloads, Professor Liu says. We might be escaping our whole lives. She points to a genre of Chinese television known as the nanny. genre. Shows within this genre always depict a babysitter, an oppressed figure in this case,

living with a wealthy family. The babysitter has a hard life until, of course, you know where this is going. She marries one of the wealthy family members and lives happily ever after, maybe. You don't have your personal life, but then you have this fantasy that you're going to find that someone's going to fall in love with you, that they're very wealthy, that they see for who you are. It's very deep, like, wish fulfillment. In Vertical Short's storylines, though, this sense of wish fulfillment is often combined with more overt fantasy. Enter those vampire lovers we were talking about.

You have to suck my blood every day or we'll both die. TikTok, the company, wanted to know more about this. Specifically more about what kinds of storylines and characters American audiences were drawn to, since that platform is how a lot of people find out about vertical shorts. According to a report TikTok released last year, we like what we like here in America, and what we like are werewolves.

Roof! Check. CEOs. Do we? And reincarnated characters. Ooh. Roles that mix personal struggles with triumphant endings. So realism mixed with fantasy? Yeah, like this could maybe actually happen to you, so you should probably keep coughing up coins to find out how this plays out just in case you too should say yes to the werewolf.

You know who's definitely saying yes to that werewolf? Okay, squirrels stop playing. Wanda. Sorry about that. I'm outside. The squirrels are playing. Wanda Brewer is in her mid-30s, lives in Tennessee, and when she's not outside watching squirrels, frolic, she's watching another. kind of frolicing in vertical shorts.

Well, I call them series. I don't call them verticals like everybody else does. One of Wanda's favorite series is Fated to My Forbidden Alpha, which she stumbled upon two years ago, just messing around on Instagram, she says. That seems like a good series to watch. The Alpha is Alpha Alexander, of course,

played by an actor named Casey Esser. I don't care if you're a maid or an orphan. I will take care of you now. Whoa, spicy. Wanda isn't just a fan of Casey Esser's. Casey, you are an amazing actor and a person. She is the administrator of the Casey Esser fandom account on Instagram. I got obsessed of watching his series because you can tell what he acts.

He gets really into his characters. Of course it's you. You always try to take much of mine. But I'm bored you what happened if you hurt her. Some people might like him as a werewolf, CEO, or a dad, but I kind of like him as a mafia boss. I would say yes to a mafia boss. They make you an offer you can't refuse.

Wanda can't resist either, in part because vertical shorts are designed to keep you watching. It's something you can actually get into and say having to wait until all you got to wait until next week to see what happens. Right then and there, you can get right to the next episode. Shouting You from Queensland University of Technology has a special term for vertical shorts. Emotional fast food. They are only focusing on romance, revenge, worry, simple storyline, predictable.

But they're still retaining the audience every minute because they try to create that instant satisfaction or, gratification every minute. And the final product feels more intimate, Shaoteng says. You're watching it on your phone, like your own personal secret. And the MO for the cinematography seems to be zoom in. They bring that closeness and they bring that kind of miniaturized world of storytelling

to the audience. And that's creating a sense of affection in. the minds of the audience. I like them all, even though if it's cheesy or revenge or romantic, because in the end, they end up the happy ever after. For superfan, Wanda, this feeling of closeness to the characters in vertical shorts has been comforting. It helps me with my anxiety.

It helps me with my depression because March 6th of 2023, I lost my brother. And I watched one of this series that helped me. out a whole lot. Wanda points to a series called The Rise of Mr. and Mrs. Mafia, in which a kind young doctor named Lance, played by her favorite actor Casey Esser, of course, has to take care of his mafia family after his father dies. Wanda says she connected with Lance's grief and his struggles with taking on family responsibilities. We both know that your brother can't handle the throne. And after I'm gone, this business, this family, it can't go on without you. I kind of seen myself as Casey's character, Lance, in that part, but not the doctor part.

I wish I could be the doctor, but the family part. Vertical shorts may be relatively new, but their storylines, from mafia doctors to lascivious billionaire husbands to sexy CEOs, are not. Shouting told us these streaming apps are usually backed by online book publishing groups. Publishers that own a lot. of intellectual property in the form of web novels or fanfiction? They have that advantage of converting this IP into audiovisual content. And I think that's why we are seeing this gaining popularity, first of all, because this company behind them, they are already invested in the IP of those content

storylines. And they know that what kind of content will be very popular among the readers. I'll give her my kidney if you marry me. All right. I'll marry you. Just keep Rebecca alive. While someone gets married and someone else keeps Rebecca alive, let's hear more on creating these things.

You heard producer Cece mentioned her friends working in the vertical shorts industry. And one of those friends is Anna. Whenever I watch people shoot, I can't hold my laughter. And I can tell that even the director can hold their laughter. because some scripts are like really silly and funny. Anna lives in New York City, and last summer, she helped to produce five vertical shorts series, just last summer.

As a new graduate, I definitely want to work harder, work extra hour to get people to recognize me. And Anna told us that, yep, a lot of vertical shorts series that are popular in the U.S. are adaptations of popular Chinese web novels. But there are also sometimes adaptations of Chinese vertical shorts that were a hit. The screenwriter translated into the U.S. script and made some parts of the script like Americanized, more understandable for the American audience.

Americanized as in they throw in some American slang. And maybe some more werewolves and CEOs and reincarnated characters, since that's what we apparently like, according to that TikTok audience. analysis. And by the way, not only the scripts are being Americanized here, so are the casts. If you're thinking, hashtag vertical shorts, so white? Yep. Professor Catherine Leo told us that when vertical shorts came to the U.S., those Chinese production companies cast white actors to play the protagonists. They're still working from a Chinese paradigm, which is that, you know, America is white. They don't understand the complexity and the diversity.

of American society. They do you understand DEI for better and worse? And it's really about fantasy. It's like this projection. Like I think they just think like romance is white people. And then we have everyday life, which is normal people. Do you think the industry has done a good job of Americanizing the product? Hmm.

This is Tony, Cici's other friend. As a deep sigh, Tony. I wouldn't say so. Tony works as a cameraman in the vertical shorts industry, also in New York City. I don't think this is an Americanizing issue. It's more like a script quality issue. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, it's just mass-produced garbage.

Wow. Tony, if you couldn't already tell, is pretty burned out on making vertical shorts. Anna is too. This particular corner of the larger industry seems to be soaring, but these up-and-coming filmmaker's spirits sure aren't. And they told us neither are their paychecks, at least from some of the vertical shorts production companies they've worked for. They pay us minimum wage and giving us like no contract.

All right. No contract, not great. Minimum wage, not what you want, but the reason for the skimpy pay might be skimpy budgets. According to that TikTok analysis of the industry from last year, a vertical shorts production company, like the ones Anna and Tony work for, usually has a budget of about $150,000 to $170,000 for an entire series. Compare that to Netflix's original series budgets, which range from $3 million to $50,000 to $50,000. $15 million per episode. Anna says the vertical shorts industry is a shortcut of everything. They squeezed the normal production of one to two months into like seven days of the production. And they also like exploit our like energies of making meaningful contents into like a short

years of time and using the 12 hours to get as much as. they need from all the crews and cars. And Anna told us that for one of those 12-hour work days, she was only making $150 as a script supervisor on her first set. You can't pay New York rent on that. No, you cannot. But you can't pay rent on no work either, which is why we're not using Anna and Tony's last names.

They can't afford to burn bridges in an industry that is offering them something right now. shouting you from Queensland University of Technology says that vertical shorts have filled a labor void in the film industry, especially over the last couple of years, when we saw tens of thousands of union actors and screenwriters and crew members on strike. And during that time, Vertical Shorts production companies swooped in with opportunities for non-union workers. They're trying to revitalize the market by how. the redundancy in the current industry. So there's work to be had, but the hours are long and the pay is bad. Then again, people are watching these vertical shorts that Tony and Anna are making.

Wanda sure is. So you'd think it'd be rewarding on some level to know that people are enjoying the fruits of their creative labor, right? Right? I think vertical shorts is an opposite of creativity, like working in those kinds. I think it's very, like, pathetic of us. Pathetic, Anna says. And that's not all she has to say about vertical shorts. How do you feel like this content impacts the creativity industry?

Just destroying the creative industry, for sure. I know that 98% of the crew and like cast working on vertical shorts don't appreciate the creative aspect of it and almost everyone is working for it only for the pay for people like us who just graduated from college it's very unfortunate that because of all the strikes all the stuff happening in the industry that we don't really have the chance to like experience what is it like to create meaningful content. Making vertical shorts might not feel meaningful to Anna. But that doesn't mean they aren't meaningful at all,

says Professor Catherine Liu of UC Irvine. She's been really impressed with the vertical shorts she's studied with her students. What they're able to do with vertical drama is already really great considering the budgetary constraints. There is no reason why. the format could not adapt or adopt science fiction, action thriller, horror, film noir, which I think are really, really, really, really mature, interesting, critical escapist,

but also like really mentally stimulating genres. Professor Liu has created something called the International Short Drama Festival at UC Irvine, which includes an award ceremony, like the Oscar. but for vertical shorts. The awards include things like Best Action Short Drama, Best Actress in a Short Series, but also Best Werewolf Drama.

To raise the level and the quality of these dramas by, you know, giving people awards and creating distinction and recognizing achievements in the genre. All of this leads to a much bigger question. Is this where Hollywood is going? Are Vertical Shorts the future of the film industry?

It would definitely not take over the current legacy media. Shouting you again. Because I think that we're witnessing online drama or web drama. They've gained their significance for some time, but never been able to replace the true quality of premium content that are produced by professionals. But Shouting also says, that even though Vertical Shorts might not replace Hollywood, they could influence it in some way.

What they will love are just traces or imprints that will change or shape the current consumer habits and industry practices. Because legacy media always absorb what's working from this new economy. This is an interesting way to think about the potential impact of Vertical Shores. that maybe they won't upheave the film and TV industry as we know it, but they might inform or disrupt it in small ways over time. Yeah, like maybe movies will stop being three-plus hours long. I'm looking at you, the Irishmen.

And the brutalist? No, the brutalist is fine. They got an intermission. It's fine. Do they really? And it's a better movie, just saying. Oh, God. Well, for every year that vertical shorts continue to be produced, feature-length films will get 60 to 90 seconds shorter on average.

But also, let's hope those production companies get organized so Anna and Tony can get paid. Oh, I'll howl at that moon all day. This episode was produced by CCU. It was co-hosted by myself and Amory Siebertson. It was mixed in sound design by Emily Jenkowski. Our managing producer is Sumitajie. Our production manager is Paul Vicus. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, Franie Monaghan, and Caitlin Harrow.

Endless Threat is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and reincarnated the werewolf CEOs. Let's just put them all together. If you got an unsolved mystery and untold history, a crazy story from the internet you want us to tell. If you want to tell me about your opinions, about my opinions on the Irishman or the brutalist. Or if you want to tell us. about a vertical short that you think we should watch. Hit us up.

Email endless thread at wbUR.org.