Meta's Reels hit a $50 billion annual revenue run rate in Q3 2025. That is as much as Netflix. Just Reels. Just the short vertical videos between posts on Instagram and Facebook.
A format that did not exist 5 years ago is now generating Netflix-level revenue - and it is not even the whole story. Microdrama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox collectively pulled in nearly $3 billion in 2025, up 115% year over year. Vertical shorts and short anime content are among the fastest-growing categories in the space. Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+, and Peacock have all launched or announced vertical video feeds in the last 6 months. TikTok is commissioning original scripted series. Fox took an equity stake in a vertical drama platform and committed to producing 200 titles. Peacock is running vertical NBA broadcasts, produced live, natively, for a phone held upright.
This is a hundred-billion-dollar restructuring of how video gets made, distributed, and monetized. And it has enormous implications for anyone sitting on intellectual property.
A third audiovisual language
Hernan Lopez, former Fox executive and founder of Owl & Company, has a framing worth internalizing. He argues that vertical video is a third audiovisual language, distinct from film, distinct from TV, with its own aesthetics, its own talent systems, its own business models, and its own economics.
The analogy is useful: if you were watching soap operas in the late 1940s, you probably would not have imagined that the same box would eventually give you the Super Bowl, Game of Thrones, and South Park. Soap operas were just the first genre. Television was the language. Vertical shorts and short anime are the soap operas of vertical video. The language itself is just getting started.
The data backs this up. ReelShort users in the US spend an average of 35.7 minutes per day in the app - more than Netflix mobile, more than Prime Video, more than Disney+. In Q4 2025, microdrama apps drove 733 million global downloads versus 658 million for long-form streamers. The audience is not sampling vertical video. They are living in it.
The economics are completely different - and that is the point
The traditional adaptation model requires enormous budgets. A single season of a prestige streaming show costs tens of millions of dollars and takes years to produce. That cost structure means only a tiny fraction of IP ever gets the greenlight. The economics are built for blockbuster bets.
Vertical flips this entirely. Production costs are a fraction of traditional TV. ReelShort is aiming to produce 400 shows in 2026. Fox committed to 200 vertical titles in a single deal. These are fast, efficient productions that can take a piece of IP from concept to audience in weeks or months.
And the content does not need to look like a Marvel movie to work. That is the critical insight. Audiences consuming vertical video do not expect the same production values as a $200 million feature film. They want compelling stories, well-told, in a format that fits the way they actually use their phone. Snackable. Bingeable. 5 to 8 minutes at a time, built on hooks and cliffhangers.
This means IP that could never justify a traditional adaptation budget suddenly becomes viable. A comic book with a devoted but modest readership becomes an animated comic series. A manga catalog becomes a short anime. A motion comic that would have cost a fortune to produce traditionally now ships in weeks. The vast middle tier - the comic books, manga titles, and creator-owned series the traditional system systematically ignores - now has a format and an economic model that can actually bring it to life.
The specific opportunity in visual IP
The IP most obviously positioned for this moment is serialized visual content: comic books, webtoons, manga, and vertical scroll comics. These formats were designed for vertical, mobile-first consumption. The character designs exist, the story arcs are built for episodic cliffhangers, and the visual language maps almost directly to what vertical video audiences respond to. Comic adaptation into an animated comic series, motion comic, or short anime is a shorter leap than almost any other form of adaptation - and vertical animation is the format that makes it native to the feed.
The opportunity extends beyond visual IP. Vertical video as a format is hungry for any IP that can deliver compelling, serialized narrative in short bursts. Book series. Podcast universes. Game worlds. Original creator concepts. The format does not care where the story came from. It cares whether it hooks you in the first 15 seconds and makes you desperate for the next episode.
Vertical video is a new way to build IP too - not just to adapt existing properties, but to originate stories in a format that is cheaper to produce, faster to market, and reaching more engaged audiences than traditional TV.
When your viewers spend 35 minutes a day in the app and pay per episode, you have an engagement loop most streaming services would trade a great deal for.
The window is open - and will not stay that way
Every major platform is building or buying their way into vertical video. Netflix launched Clips. Disney+ launched Verts. Paramount+ has a short-form feed. TikTok is commissioning originals. The infrastructure is being built in real time.
Lopez noted something that resonates: the stage where most of the "firsts" have not happened yet. The first great vertical sitcom. The first vertical mockumentary. The first breakout animated comic series adapted from a mid-catalog comic book. The first motion comic that earns more from vertical shorts than the original print run ever did. The first vertical franchise that spins up across languages simultaneously. These are all open lanes.
For IP holders, this is not a question of whether vertical matters. The hundred billion dollars in annual revenue answered that. The question is whether you activate your IP while the playing field is still forming.
The phone is vertical. The audience is vertical. The money is vertical. The only question left is whether your IP is too.
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