“I think that they're operating on a spam logic. … They are closer to a spammy mobile game than they are to Netflix in the sense that their core business model is spending millions upon millions of dollars to advertise on TikTok and Instagram to get people to then download their platforms and ideally buy a subscription, buy tokens, whatever. But the sheer amount of money involved in acquiring customers this way and the fact that very few of those customers are sort of retained month to month make the economic model really unsustainable.”
the culture journalist · Media & Creator Economy · October 2026
Context
The hosts noted that the main microdrama app charges more per month than mainstream streamers. Kolitz explains how these platforms actually make money and why he thinks the model is shaky.
Transcript
…mean, they operate in a few ways or they generate revenue in a few ways. There is a subscription model. So for the low price of $39.99 a month, you can subscribe to Real Shorts and have unlimited access to their content. There are tokens that you can buy to buy individual episodes. Which I just say
is crazy because that's like a lot more than like your mainstream streamers. You know, it is. It's more than like Netflix or you know, HBO Max or whatever.
Well, I think that they're operating on a spam logic. And, you know, many people have pointed it out. I think this is very true of the industry, which is that they are closer to a spammy mobile game than they are to Netflix in the sense that their core business model is spending millions upon millions of dollars to advertise on TikTok and Instagram to get people to then download their platforms and ideally buy a subscription, buy tokens, whatever. But the sheer amount of money involved in acquiring customers this way and the fact that very few of those customers are sort of retained month to month make the economic model really unsustainable. And a lot of people are unclear about, you know, how they can keep going in this way. But the way it worked when I first started reporting this story was, let's churn out as many of these as humanly possible for as little money as humanly possible. And so, you know, individual seasons are being made for $80,000, $100,000, essentially zero dollars on a kind of Hollywood budget scale. It's my…
Right. You start reading. I mean, even when I started reading the piece, like a third of the way into it before you even got to this point, I was just like, why are they even bothering with humans knowing that text out there? And then I think you've like literally ended up writing that line.
Yeah. I mean, it's true because you watch them and you're like, these it's almost as if they were not just like training their own AI, but training audiences to be like, this is what content looks like. You know, it's like it was like easing us into an AI future. Because yes, of course, what…
Yeah. The question we had was about like who was working on these productions. And we mean that both in terms of the performers and the crew. Did it seem to be people who fell through the cracks of the traditional industry or like a whole new class of creative workers in the sense that like YouTube…
More from the culture journalist
