Mediabistro Weekly Drop: Salute Your Shorts Edition

It’s a cycle that’s as ubiquitous over the past few decades in this industry as sweeping corporate layoffs at The Walt Disney Company®, mid-major studios navigating ownership changes, or existential dread about the future every time a new technological paradigm emerges (every home entertainment executive was too busy ignoring the rise of the internet, preoccupying themselves with the “category killers” of Laser Discs, DiVX and HDDVD, respectfully).

We’ve known since the days of BetaMax (a far superior product to VHS, whose legacy lives on every time someone refers to Columbia Pictures as Sony), if not their repeated legislative and lobbying attempts to crush the nascent TV industry, that the major studios are notoriously bad at predicting what format is going to be the next big thing. Like, CarolCo development executive or Verve talent agent bad.

The cycle seems to be repeating itself, with formats such as IMAX. 3D films and PCI sliding in the industry’s popular opinion faster than the careers of Will Smith, Amber Heard and James Corden, three camera sitcoms or PerezHilton.com subscriptions.

What’s replacing them as that latest and greatest (and ephemeral) trendy format that fixes everything that ails legacy media is one where the auteurs are more likely to be found in a high school yearbook than on the Black List.

This format, of course, is exclusively visual, largely mis-en-scene and shot not on an FX6 or the Arri Alexa 35, but instead, on off-the-shelf cell phone cameras (whose frame rates and focal lengths are, admittedly, competitive).

And because this new format of video content is produced and optimized for viewing on cell phone screens, the untraditional studio content that’s becoming increasingly ubiquitous is predominantly short term, as anyone who’s consuming a ton of streaming content on a mobile device is known to have a worse attention span than Goku or Naruto (if you get those references, congrats - you’re a huge nerd, just like me).

This week didn’t so much confirm the entrenchment of short-form content as the newest entry in the long-running format wars as it did the viability and commercial possibilities of the type of “second screen,” disposable content that was long considered anathema to any film professional outside of Chatsworth.

First, we saw a streamer effectively regain licensing rights to the exact same content it spent years convincing investors and the market it didn’t need to scale. Next, we witnessed the evolution of the editor role from cutting celluloid on flatbed to using AI tools to create coherent narratives from a pastiche of cell phone footage, which makes cinema verite seem highly produced and overly staged. It’s also way more in demand with employers and producers than almost any other gig in the industry, with the possible exception of IP attorneys and multimedia producers.

We’ve also seen evidence of the entrenchment of an entire creative economy built on offering day rates that make internships look lucrative, drawing side eyes and sighs from any guild signatory with any memory of what we used to call a “schedule of minimums” (minimums, in this case, being literal). And, this week, we also saw the future of the business of entertainment, which, turns out, in these liminal times, is as simple as just, you know, redefining what “growth” looks like and how to measure it.

None of these shifts are in any way subtle - as one would expect from the entertainment business. But what makes the rise of short-form content worth a closer look is that this shift represents a seismic shift in the skills and experience that entertainment companies are looking for, with profound implications for long-term careers (and short-term attention spans).

As Carrie Fisher once said, Hollywood had perfected the art of “fake closeness,” so it only makes sense an industry built on in-person lunches at the Ivy and personal introductions from power players is embracing the parasocial. Which, as a bonus, doesn’t require getting on the 405 or 101 - even if it does involve becoming hyperfixated on traffic volume.

After all, that’s how ad space gets sold.

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On August 5, Netflix rolled out a new hub for subscribers called “Tundum,” which is the supposed onomatopoeia for the “ba-dum” sound that the streamer makes when users log on, suggesting the streamer is attempting to pivot from stand alone streamer to interconnected ecosystem. Hey, anything to distract shareholders and industry insiders from its plummeting revenue and paid subscriber numbers, right?

Tundum, sort of an app within the Netflix platform, basically works by aggregating thousands of short term videos from such erstwhile media brands as Buzzfeed, Conde Nast, Hearts and People Inc - not to mention industry journals of record such as Variety, Rolling Stone and People Magazine.

According to Netflix, its subscribers now get such inducements as access to Vanity Fair’s “Lie Detector” segments or BuzzFeed’s “Celeb 30 Questions” video listicles, which, like podcasts, now get prime real estate on subscribers homepage feeds, right next to unwatched prestige dramas, six part true crime docuseries and approximately 690 overdubbed South Korean soap operas.

The stated goal of Netflix is to create audience engagement and give them a reason to return to the platform in between seasons of such hit shows as Squid Game, Wednesday, or Bridgerton - albeit a bit late for the eight-year hiatuses between Stranger Things seasons.

Here’s the part that you might want to sit with for a second; Byron Allen (aka Stephen Colbert’s replacement) spent most of late July buying out around a third of Buzzfeed’s remaining staff (Top 10 Signs Your Career Might Be Imminently Screwed) across its diffuse media properties, which amounted to around 180 full-time employees across BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Tasty.

This was announced as a cost cutting move designed to fund Allen’s $120 million takeover of BuzzFeed, a necessary consolidation so that the publisher can continue to pursue its lofty journalistic standards and Pulitzer worthy reporting.

But, in as big of a twist as the nation’s top rated late night show getting replaced by the king of syndicated content, a week and a half later, Netflix basically bought full control over the IP and content catalog that those very same newly re-orged employees built - only at a fraction of what it would have cost to build a competing short term content platform from the ground up (see: Quilbi, because you’d be the one).

This is a microcosm of the media today. You don’t need to actually have creators on your payroll; you just need to have a contract in place for all that archived content once the layoffs and austerity measures are finally over. Content is forever. Creators are, well, commodities.

This model is obviously efficient - but the cost of efficiency is prohibitively steep for creatives - or at least, as close to “creative” as anyone who’s bylined for Buzzfeed or HuffPost (the former was paid largely on traffic, the latter notoriously wasn’t paid at all, so the message is more significant than the money here).

Read more: The Culture Edit: Fan Favorite Videos from the Biggest Digital Publishers Now on Netflix via Netflix Tudum (editor’s note: this long and overly descriptive title was clearly written by someone trained in the Buzzfeed house style).

If you’re a video producer or editor at a legacy digital publisher, your existing back catalog just became more valuable to your employer as a licensing asset than you are as an active headcount line.

That’s not a reason to freak out, but it is a reason to take a closer look at your own analytics. Know which of your franchises get the views, which format they perform best in, and make sure that work is attached to your name somewhere your next employer can find it.

Mediabistro’s own hiring roundup lined up three job listings that have basically nothing in common except the moment they landed in. The New Republic wants a copy editor for its morning politics newsletter. Louisville Public Media wants an afternoon-drive anchor who can also report, produce, and show up at community events.

And News Daddy, a short-form news brand nobody outside Gen Z has heard of (they have 19 million TikTok followers, which is pretty impressive, to be honest) wants freelance editors who can turn a script into a polished vertical video in a matter of hours, sourcing and fact-checking their own footage along the way.

What connects them isn’t the medium (which is not, contrary to popular belief, the message). It’s a shared anxiety about audience retention showing up in wildly different job descriptions.

A century-old political magazine and a TikTok account with no legacy masthead at all are hiring for basically the same underlying skill: someone who can hold editorial judgment steady. no matter what container the content ends up in.

Except, maybe, for Buzzfeed.

Read more: Editorial and Production Roles Signal a Strong August for Media Hiring, via Mediabistro

Specialization isn’t dead, but single-format specialization is getting harder to sell on its own. If your resume says “writer” or “editor” full stop, start building a second or third proof point, a newsletter you’ve run, a short-form video you’ve cut, a live segment you’ve produced, anything that shows range across formats rather than depth in exactly one.

The News Daddy listing in particular is a signal worth clocking: it wants news judgment traditionally associated with print or broadcast newsrooms, applied at short-form speed. If you came up in a traditional newsroom and are worried you’re behind on video, you’re probably more hireable for it than you think.

Using tools and LLMs is easy. Enforcing editorial standards? Not so much.

SPIN’s rundown of the microdrama boom, published August 12, lays out the vertical-drama economy about as plainly as anyone has this year. These are the two-minutes-or-less serialized romances and revenge sagas built for phones, the ones with titles that read like they were generated by an algorithm that only understands billionaires and werewolves, because in a lot of cases that’s basically what happened.

Apps like ReelShort and DramaBox are shooting dozens of these series a month in Los Angeles, mostly with non-union crews, and per SPIN’s reporting the pay for everyone who isn’t a recognizable name like Taye Diggs sits around $500 a day.

That’s the ceiling in a lot of cases, not the floor - so YouTube might not be in trouble, but there are a ton of competitive short-form video apps that just might feel the pressure.

The demand side seems insatiable; ReelShort alone reportedly tripled its full-time staff over the past year, and the format is pulling in underemployed actors, recent film school graduates, and writers who can’t get traditional TV or feature work in a town that’s been shooting less of both.

The real catch, as always, is the supply side. Every one of those production companies is drawing from the same enormous pool of people trying to break in, the exact dynamic that depresses day rates no matter how much the format itself is growing or how successful the content is at generating audiences and eyeballs.

This is an industry that’s generating billions of dollars, but, like all gig economy platforms, its margins are predicated on minimizing labor costs and liability, meaning that the real revenue is being directly generated by low-income workers who have no standing or structure to negotiate better terms, rates or residuals.

That’s not saying they have no power - they’re the ones responsible for ensuring these platforms remain viable, profitable and scalable. They just have to realize that when it comes to short form, they’ve got to play the long game, too.

Read more: Going Vertical: How Microdramas Are Maxxing Streaming Viewers, via SPIN

Microdrama work can be a legitimate way to build reels, credits, and reps in a tight production market, but go in with eyes open about the economics. Ask directly whether a project falls under a WGA or SAG-AFTRA contract before you sign anything, since guild writers in particular are not supposed to work on covered projects outside a guild agreement, and the distinction matters more than the paycheck in the moment.

Treat these gigs as volume-building steps toward something with better terms, not as a destination. The people getting the most out of this format long-term are the ones using it as a portfolio engine, not the ones treating $500 a day as a living wage.

Starting August 24, per PPC Land’s detailed writeup of a YouTube Help Center announcement, a “view” on the platform counts the moment a video starts playing, full stop, across Shorts, long-form uploads, and live streams alike; there’s no minimum watch time required.

YouTube is upfront about the fact that public view counts will (obviously) start skyrocketing, comparatively speaking.

The Google-owned entity, in the very same breath, kept the transparency trend going by openly stating that none of these ostensible ad plays impact creator monetization models or visibility. Also staying the same: the partner program still runs on a much stricter metric called “engaged views” that aren’t applied to individual content creators.

Notably, YouTube has at least two separate, and distinct, definitions around what counts as an “engaged view” within their own documentation. Which one is the correct one? We’re guessing whichever results in the smallest payout from YouTube relative to context.

But, long story short, when it comes to analytics, the bellwether metric that’s the most visible on the platform (views) is about to become artificially inflated, but the baseline that determines how much a creator actually gets paid for those views is set to remain the same.

That gap has existed for Shorts since a similar change back in 2025, and it’s producing a well-documented split between the figure a creator waves at a brand deal, and the figure that shows up in their bank account.

Extending that same split to long-form and live content means the entire platform now runs on two definitions of “watched” that happen to point in opposite directions depending on who’s asking.

Read more: YouTube makes a view an impression across all formats from August 24, via PPC Land

If any part of your job touches creator partnerships, brand deals, or performance reporting, this is worth flagging to whoever signs off on those numbers before August 24 hits and the counters visibly jump.

For creators and social producers specifically, don’t let a rising public view count become the metric you build a pitch or a raise request around. Learn to talk fluently in engaged views and watch-hour eligibility instead, since that’s the version of the number that actually determines whether a channel or a role is sustainable.

Being the person in the room who understands the difference between a platform’s marketing metric and its money metric is a genuinely useful, underrated skill right now. Except if you’re me. I’m pretty broke.

But then again, I have a film degree, so there’s that.

None of this can be tied up in a tidy package; there’s no straightforward story about how short-term video is taking over legacy media, and maybe that’s the most important insight here.

Some of what’s happening here is genuinely good for job seekers willing to move fast: new categories, real hiring, real demand for people who can think in vertical format without losing their editorial judgment along the way. Some of it is just old exploitation wearing a new aspect ratio.

The format isn’t the thing to be cynical about. Now, who profits from it, and who’s left covering the gap, is a different story entirely. But we’re guessing their last name is “Ellison.”

Until next week,

Matt Charney

Executive Editor, Mediabistro