Micro dramas

 

Anish Moonka

@anishmoonka

Those one-minute drama clips you keep seeing on your phone (billionaire romances, revenge plots that end on a cliffhanger every 60 seconds) are part of a $7 billion industry in China. They now make more money there than they do from actual movie theaters. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, already has a micro-drama app in China with 250 million monthly users. The average person spends over 100 minutes a day watching. Three years ago, this industry barely existed. $500 million in 2021. $7 billion by 2024. 662 million people in China watch these now. Each show has 60 to 100 episodes, about a minute or two each, filmed vertically so you watch them the same way you scroll TikTok. Soap operas, but each episode is the length of a single TikTok video. So when TikTok files a US trademark for "TikTok Drama," quietly launches a separate app called PineDrama in the US and Brazil, and starts casting actors for original shows this month, they know exactly what they're doing. They already have the playbook. It already works. One show, "The Divorced Billionaire Heiress" (the title alone tells you everything about the genre), cost less than $200,000 to make. It pulled in roughly $35 million in North America. A full season costs $100,000 to $300,000. Unknown actors and small crews. Full seasons filmed in under two weeks. In 2020, a Hollywood executive named Jeffrey Katzenberg raised $1.75 billion to build something basically like this. Short shows for your phone. He hired Steven Spielberg. He spent $100,000 per minute of content. Dead in six months. The whole library got sold to Roku for under $100 million. Quibi spent more on a single Super Bowl ad ($5.6 million) than most micro-dramas cost to produce an entire season. An app called ReelShort does the exact same format. Chinese-backed, same cheap production model. It hit 370 million downloads and $700 million in revenue last year. The global micro-drama market is on track to reach $26 billion by 2030, according to research firm Media Partners Asia. TikTok has one thing none of these apps can match. 1.6 billion users are already on the platform. Every other micro-drama app spends 80 to 90 percent of its budget on ads to find viewers. TikTok already knows who watches what and can put a show directly in front of the exact person who would binge it. TikTok Shop moved $33 billion worth of products in 2024. In China, brands like Starbucks and KFC already make micro-dramas in which their products are woven into the story. Picture watching a 90-second episode and buying what the character is wearing before the next one loads. ByteDance made roughly $186 billion in revenue last year. They watched this format go from nothing to bigger than China's entire movie theater business in four years. Now they're bringing it to the US.

Before AutoCAD

 

Massimo

@Rainmaker1973

·

5h

Office life before the invention of AutoCAD and other drafting software. Prior to the release of AutoCAD in 1982, engineering drawings were all done by hand using different grade pencils, erasers, T-squares and set squares.

How to study

 

Ihtesham Ali

@ihtesham2005

·

7h

I accidentally discovered how to compress a semester of learning into 48 hours. A grad student at MIT showed me his NotebookLM setup. I thought he was just organized. Then I watched him pass a qualifying exam on a subject he'd never studied before. Here's exactly what he did: First: he didn't upload a textbook. He uploaded 6 textbooks, 15 research papers, and every lecture transcript he could find on the subject. Then he asked NotebookLM one question: "What are the 5 core mental models that every expert in this field shares?" Not "summarize this." Not "explain this topic." Mental models. The stuff that takes professors years to develop. But the next part is what broke my brain. He followed up with: "Now show me the 3 places where experts in this field fundamentally disagree, and what each side's strongest argument is." In 20 minutes he had a map of the entire intellectual landscape of the field: the debates, the consensus, the open questions. Most students spend a full semester just figuring out what those debates even are. Then he did something I've never seen before. He asked: "Generate 10 questions that would expose whether someone deeply understands this subject versus someone who just memorized facts." He spent the next 6 hours answering those questions using the source material. Every wrong answer triggered a follow-up: "Explain why this is wrong and what I'm missing." By hour 48, he could hold a conversation with his thesis advisor without getting destroyed. The tool didn't change. The questions did. Most people treat NotebookLM like a fancy highlighter. These students are using it like a private tutor who has read everything ever written on the subject. The difference between a semester and 48 hours isn't the amount of content. It's knowing which questions to ask.

Mr Beast on social media

 

Jack

@Jackkk

·

15h

MrBeast reveals the secret to getting millions of views on social media “A big part of getting 100,000,000 views on a video is whether it’s something someone has seen before or not. There’s this analogy I like to use, if you’re driving down the road and see a cow, you’re probably not going to look at it. Who cares, you see them all the time. But if you’re driving down the road and see a purple cow you’re going to look like four times and remember it” “It’s kind of the same way on social media. If you’re scrolling through videos and it’s something you’ve seen before it’s like seeing a regular cow. But if it’s a video you’ve never seen before, like putting a bunker underground and having two people live in it, that’s the equivalent of a purple cow on social media” “Make your ideas the purple cow, don’t just be the cow”