Beyond the Billionaire: How Indie Verticals Are Rethinking the Format
Here’s the pattern: He’s a CEO. Or a billionaire. Or a mafia boss. Or a vampire, an alpha — but always rich and powerful. She falls in love with him. Or there’s a contract marriage, a secret baby, a betrayal, a redemption arc across 80 episodes. Roll credits. Repeat. The same thing over and over, just repackaged.
Over 70% of the top-grossing vertical dramas follow some version of this loop. The settings change. The tropes rotate. But the underlying formula is almost always the same: wealth fantasy meets romantic escalation. It works. The numbers prove it. But when an entire market bets on one crop, that’s not a strategy — it’s a monoculture. And monocultures are fragile.
The same blueprint, just repainted
And it’s not only the packaging that repeats — it’s the emotional blueprint underneath. Take a currently running vertical: a supernatural being injures himself trying to save his contract wife. She could help him, but she hesitates — because at the same moment she’s expected to save a man who treats her badly. Her family drags her away. In the end, the supernatural being finds his love elsewhere. No one in this story acts out of free choice; everyone moves along the same machinery of self-sacrifice, disregard, and belated regret.
The same pattern exists in mirror image: the woman sacrifices herself, the man treats her with contempt, she finds her love elsewhere — and in the end he realizes what he lost. The genders are interchangeable. The setting is interchangeable. Even the supernatural element is interchangeable. What remains is always the same emotional algorithm.
And this is exactly where the real risk lies. Even when we feel for the characters at some point the audience sees through the pattern. Predictability becomes sameness, and sameness becomes boring. A market that knows only one blueprint trains its own audience to eventually look away. That’s my concern — not that there are too many billionaires, but that there’s only one story, endlessly repainting itself.
The numbers behind the loop
The global microdrama market hit roughly $11 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $14 billion by the end of 2026, according to research firm Omdia. According to Vpaa – ReelShort alone plans to release over 400 shows this year – with a content strategy explicitly built around “repeating IPs” and franchise logic. The machine is running. And it’s running on romance.
Now add AI to the equation. In China, over 10,000 AI-generated microdrama titles are released every month. The share of AI content in top charts has surged from 7% to nearly 40% within a single year. As investor Shangguan Hongtold says to MIT Technology Review: “No one comes to short dramas expecting high art. In a sense, short drama is perfectly compatible with AI.” And that’s exactly what we should be paying attention to and changing, so verticals can absolutely achieve artistic quality.
This is monoculture on steroids. AI doesn’t diversify the market – it reinforces whatever already sells. More billionaire plots, faster and cheaper. And that’s where the dangerous circle begins: as long as the format is built on one simple blueprint, it remains artistically shallow enough for a machine to imitate effortlessly. Monoculture keeps expectations low and low expectations are exactly where AI thrives. The format doesn’t move forward, and that is exactly why AI has such an easy game.
So why doesn’t anyone try?
The honest answer: because the data backs the formula. The standard recipe makes money, and you can read it off any dashboard. Conversion rates, watch time, retention – everything says wealth fantasy plus romantic escalation works. Anyone financing a vertical is making a risk decision. And the familiar is always the safer investment.
That’s understandable. But it’s also a trap. Because the same data that rewards the formula today only measures what already exists. It can’t show what an audience would watch if it were offered. A metric that captures only successful billionaire dramas will always conclude that billionaire dramas work. That’s not market insight – it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And that’s exactly why it’s not an argument against experimenting, but for it. Because the counter-examples already exist — and they work.
It can be done differently. And it’s already proven.
Time Away is an indie sci-fi series set in 1881, built around a scientist, a time traveler, and the American Civil War. It runs weekly on Instagram, costs nothing, and is produced independently in the Great Lakes region. No platform deal. No algorithm optimization. Just a story someone wanted to tell — in vertical.
In Germany, Size Does Matter by Kevin Silvergieter shows it can be done here too: a queer love story about body positivity, produced through his own company and released on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Director Dirk Rosenlöcher has said publicly that there’s almost no precedent for this kind of production in the German market. They’re building the path as they walk it.
And there’s more: Trümmerkind, a vertical micro-drama series, tells the story of two brothers, Zazan and Apo, for whom the line between what’s wrong and what seems necessary increasingly blurs. No billionaire, no romance escalation – instead family, guilt, and survival. Another German indie vertical deliberately going its own way.
And that it can also work commercially and across genres is proven by SuperFan: produced for CandyJar with the All-American Rejects, a dark comedy thriller where the band’s new album is woven directly into the narrative. No romance loop. No wealth fantasy. A branded vertical showing the format can carry entirely different genres and business models.
These productions don’t show that it could be done differently. They show that it is being done differently.
The door is open
And the infrastructure is here. With PineDrama, launched in January 2026, TikTok created a free platform dedicated entirely to vertical drama — no paywall, no per-episode unlock. Within three months: million downloads. Issa Rae’s thriller Screen Time hit nearly 75 million views in its first week (Los Angeles Times) – proof that non-romance content doesn’t just survive on the platform, it can lead. PineDrama isn’t just another app. It’s an open door – especially for indie creators who don’t fit the ReelShort formula.
Germany’s public broadcaster ARD is experimenting too: Between The Beats, a vertical drama mixing ballet with K-pop aesthetics, launched on TikTok in April 2026, produced by Red Pony and Saxonia Media for Radio Bremen and SR.
The German window
The German vertical market is still early. That’s not a weakness – it’s a strategic position. While established markets are locked into the romance-industrial complex, Germany has the rare chance to not copy the formula but to define its own. The infrastructure is there. TikTok is open. Indie production is possible. The audience isn’t trained to expect only billionaires.
What’s missing isn’t technology or platforms. What’s missing is courage and the willingness to bet that audiences want more than what the algorithm already knows how to sell.
My take
This isn’t an argument against billionaire dramas. They work, they’ll keep working, and the people who make them know exactly what they’re doing. But a market that tells only one story is a market that leaves audiences – and creators – behind. The vertical format can carry science fiction, thriller, queer stories, branded content, historical drama. It’s already doing it.
The question isn’t whether different works. It’s whether the industry is paying attention.
