The future of short-form video: ad-funded scale versus paid intensity

Opinion

Quibi failed because it sought to launch a mobile-first premium product while remaining anchored to an ad-funded media logic that was already fracturing. The future of short-form won’t make the same mistake.

Not everything that looks like TikTok wants to be monetised like TikTok.

Quibi is remembered as one of media’s great failures.

Launched in 2020, the short-form video app arrived with Hollywood talent, lavish budgets and a simple promise: premium, TV-quality storytelling built for the phone. Little over two years later, it was dead, having burned through close to $2bn and then sold to Roku for a reported bargain of $100m.

Ouch. But hold on…

Just a few years on, short-form video is not only dominant on mobile, but is also mutating into something far more interesting — and far more commercially disruptive — than advertising inventory.

Seen through that lens, Quibi starts to look less like a ridiculous misfire and more like an early signal the industry didn’t yet know how to interpret.

Honey, I shrunk the clips

For decades, the media business has been organised around a single economic assumption: attention is monetised at scale through advertising.

Short-form video was supposed to slot neatly into that system. And on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, it largely has.

Even though content is now distributed algorithmically to individuals rather than programmed for mass audiences, its commercial success is still governed by familiar forces: celebrity, controversy, and the managed tension between novelty and recognition.

But away from the centre of the ad market, a parallel economy has been quietly forming, one that optimises not for scale, but for intensity.

The latest example of this is mobile-first microdrama apps, ReelShort and DramaBox. After some initial free two-minute episodes, viewers are drip-fed access through token systems, nudged into repeated micro-payments to continue the narrative.

And the first thing you notice? They’re terrible.

The acting isn’t believable in the slightest, characters are babyish caricatures whose dialogue exists merely for plot exposition, and the cuts are so furiously quick that you might get whiplash in your eyes.

To explain the real appeal of these microdramas, we have to look at mobile gaming economics.

Advertising is considered second-rate

Gaming has always been a puzzle for marketers.

How to explain the relative scarcity of advertising in video games, a media genre that, according to Denstu, has grown larger than movies and music combined, even as those industries migrated happily to on-demand platforms with ad tiers?

Mobile gaming, perfected by companies like King and Supercell, changed the economics entirely. Rather than elevating advertising, it made direct payment the primary engine of value.

Games like Candy Crush are designed around variable rewards, artificial scarcity and friction-based monetisation, with advertising positioned as a secondary option for users unwilling to pay.

In other words: reel players in for free, get them hooked, then push them to pay — either through in-app purchases or by submitting to ads.

But crucially, the ads are so irritating, so interruptive, and so low-rent that you’re left with the distinct impression you’re being punished for not paying. It’s the realisation of a dystopian Silicon Valley attitude that advertising is somehow for “losers” who can’t afford to opt out.

Compare this with what commercial radio and TV have been doing for years: creating content formats designed with advertising in mind, such as a police procedural whose script features mini-cliffhangers before each ad break. The content is respectful rather than intolerant toward advertising.

But if ad-funded media is optimised for tolerance, paid-attention media is optimised for dependency. Success is measured in retention curves and lifetime value, not in reach or share.

None of this is to say these systems will remain unchallenged. Models built on compulsion, dependency, and monetised intensity are already encroaching on regulatory and consumer-protection territory — but for now, they are growing faster than the frameworks designed to scrutinise them.

When it comes to microdramas, advertising is not absent from these products by accident. It would break them.

This distinction matters because much of the industry’s experimentation is stuck between the two.

The courage to kick away the ladder

Broadcasters and streamers can see where engagement is going, but they struggle to follow the economics.

When platforms like Paramount+ flirt with short-form video, creator tools or user-generated feeds, they are responding to real shifts in consumption. What they are less willing to concede is the loss of control, revenue sharing and advertiser primacy that make paid-attention systems actually work.

This tension explains why legacy media’s attempts to “add creators” so often feel half-formed.

When Disney recently floated plans to let creators make short-form content on Disney+, much of the reaction was warnings of quality dilution or an influx of “AI slop”.

I was more interested in the underlying question: whether a platform built around advertising primacy and tight brand control can ever accommodate creator economics that rely on intensity, intimacy and direct audience value.

At last! Disney embraces creators — now who else has the courage to follow?

And when it comes to designing the platforms on which this content lives, you cannot graft compulsion-based design onto an ad-first worldview and expect the same results.

The most successful paid-attention ecosystems emerged outside traditional media institutions because they were never required to reconcile those tensions.

So we don’t just get media fragmentation, but also privatisation.

As more attention moves into paid, closed and emotionally intensive environments, it becomes invisible to standard planning tools, unreachable by brands and detached from shared cultural infrastructure.

Advertising doesn’t merely lose inventory in this world. It loses its seat at the table.

Building for intensity, not scale

Which brings us back to Quibi, whose “concepts and failures inspired widespread mockery”, according to its official Wikipedia history.

But Quibi did not fail because people didn’t want short-form video on their phones. They clearly do and, apparently, are willing to part with actual money to get their next hit of My Sister is the WarLord Queen.

Seen through this lens, Quibi failed because it tried to launch a premium, mobile-first product while remaining anchored to an ad-funded media logic that was already starting to fracture.

It charged users, but thought like a broadcaster. It built short-form stories, but imagined they would sit inside a familiar advertising ecosystem.

Thus, the future of short-form attention may be more valuable when sold directly rather than indirectly.

The next Quibi will not make that mistake. It will be built for intensity, not scale. It will not court advertisers.

And it will not care whether the ad industry is ready to follow.

Omar Oakes was the founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years.