The Vertical Bloom: 02/19/26
Your guide on the happenings of the vertical drama landscape.
Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.
Fresh Takes
Prime Video Confirms Microdrama Exploration—Says VP
Prime Video’s new VP of International Originals, Nicole Clemens (ex-Paramount Television Studios), didn’t hedge: Amazon is watching the micro-series surge closely and isn’t ruling out a move. At the same time, she’s doubling down on exportable non-English originals—content built to travel, not just trend locally. This announcement feels inevitable following concrete statements from other media giants such as Disney and Netflix. The question now is—who will strike first, and who will do it best?
Holywater Doubles Down on AI: Absorbs Jeynix and Rebrands as ‘Holywater Tech’
In a move that formalizes its tech-first DNA, vertical powerhouse Holywater has acquired AI-assisted VFX company Jeynix and will now operate under the name Holywater Tech. The rebrand isn’t cosmetic — it codifies what the company has always prioritized: building proprietary technology into the core of its production pipeline. Jeynix, known for hyper-realistic visual effects and performance-preserving AI workflows, is being integrated to deliver cinematic-level visuals at microdrama speed and cost, while enabling rapid localization across markets in a matter of days. In a format defined by volume, margin sensitivity, and global scalability, this is less about aesthetics and more about competitive infrastructure. If tech-native production becomes the baseline, are traditional in-house studios prepared to keep pace — and when AI capability becomes standard, what does that ultimately mean for the creative ceiling of the content itself?
Quote from a joint statement by co-founders / co-CEO’s Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov:
“Holywater Tech aims to build a category-defining entertainment company that brings together creators’ imagination and cutting-edge technology, especially AI, to unlock new creative possibilities at scale. Jeynix demonstrated a level of visual truth and performance preservation like face matching, that we simply couldn’t find elsewhere. Bringing this expertise in-house allows us to reinvest our production budgets into significantly higher quality, faster iteration, and more consistent results across our slate.”
Crocs Steps Into Microdrama With ReelShort Debut
Crocs has entered original entertainment via microdrama, launching Charmed to Meet You on ReelShort on February 13. Inspired by a real love story involving an employee, the short-form series follows a young woman who sparks a flirtation with her mysterious neighbor by leaving a Jibbitz charm on his bare Crocs Classic Clogs; a romance told in scroll-ready episodes. This isn’t a campaign; it’s narrative product placement built for vertical consumption. As brands look for deeper audience connection, microdrama is emerging as a storytelling-driven marketing channel—and Crocs is simply early to the shift.
Platform Spotlight
DreameShort represents vertical’s IP-native turn: romance-forward, data-backed, and built directly from a web-novel ecosystem rather than speculative development. Instead of chasing scale through raw volume, the platform adapts pre-validated digital fiction into tightly engineered micro-episodes calibrated for emotional clarity and paywall conversion. The strategy isn’t discovery, it’s optimization. As vertical professionalizes and tech tightens its grip on greenlights, DreameShort embodies a larger shift: when audience data validates story before production begins, efficiency becomes the moat — and the open question is how much creative risk the format can still afford.
Show Spotlight
The Golden Pear Affair (P&G):
Logline: When a young woman’s sister disappears amid an international jewelry heist, she’s pulled into a globe-spanning mystery where romance and betrayal glitter just as brightly as the stolen gems.
Genre: Romantic Adventure / Mystery
This 55-episode “microsoap,” totaling just under 80 minutes, compresses the DNA of daytime melodrama into 60-to-165-second bursts. The Golden Pear Affair isn’t reinventing the soap—it’s resizing it. Cliffhangers replace act breaks, emotional reversals land every two minutes, and the serialized engine does what it has always done best: weaponize longing.
For Procter & Gamble, the company that helped invent the soap opera format in the 1930s, this isn’t experimentation, it’s evolution. When a legacy architect of broadcast melodrama embraces vertical distribution, it signals permission for the broader industry to stop treating microdrama as a side bet and start recognizing it as the next logical container for serialized storytelling.
Poster for ‘The Golden Pear Affair’
To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…
Industry Insider
Evan Shapiro, a data analyst working with legacy institutions across all types of media, shares his critique of the microdrama model. See a brief breakdown of his argument below:
Exemplified by ReelShort—he claims that the structure is broken. Built on aggressive pay-to-unlock mechanics and massive CPI spend, any revenue generated is burnt by acquiring users, resulting in staggering losses. Any organic growth, he says, is churn monetized through paid acquisition at escalating CACs. Add inconsistent market data and opaque reporting, and the foundation looks less like a scalable media business and more like a cash-intensive growth loop that only works with deep-pocketed backing.
That said, vertical itself isn’t the problem—the model is. A shift is underway toward ungated, ad-supported distribution, where brands, agencies, and premium platforms are rethinking microdrama as vertically formatted television rather than loot-box content. The next phase isn’t gated micro-episodes; it’s premium, ad-supported vertical TV built for simultaneous life on streaming and social. The format is evolving, just not in the way its early pioneers predicted.
Read the rest of his take here.