Feeding the Habit: Inside Australia’s Growing Vertical Drama Sector

As vertical drama production accelerates globally, Australian writers are beginning to engage with the fast-moving, high-volume format and grappling with what it means for storytelling, sustainability and the local industry.

Stephen Vagg talks to Melbourne-based screenwriters Sarah Mayberry and Chris Gist
about writing vertical dramas in Australia.

One of the hot entertainment trends for Western countries in 2025 was vertical dramas, short-form video series specifically designed for vertical viewing on phones.

The genre originated in China (where they are known as duanju), and transformed the national audio-visual market in that country. It is estimated that vertical dramas will be worth $14 billion by 2027, and Western production companies, including Australian ones, are desperate to get in on the action.

A pioneer practitioner of the genre in Australia is author Sarah Mayberry who has spent the past few years regularly writing verticals in collaboration with her professional and personal partner, Chris Gist.

They became involved through Selina Yurou Zhang and Daniel Chua, VCA graduates who set up Turtle Media, a Melbourne-based production team that makes vertical content. In its first year of operations, Turtle Media’s productions such as Fake It Til We Make It, Cover Story and Light My Fire attracted over 130 million viewers. Mayberry and Gist work exclusively for Turtle Media, with their work being seen on apps such as TikTok, DramaBox, Content Republic and MiniShort. “They all need content,” says Mayberry. “If someone likes vertical dramas you’ve got to feed their habit.”

The verticals Mayberry and Gist write typically comprise of 55 to 80 episodes per series, with each episode running between sixty to ninety seconds.  Plots tend to be melodramatic. According to Gist, “Vertical taps into strong emotions that we all understand: family bonds and tensions, love, ambition, things we cherish that others would take from us. Adding the allure of money and power with life and death stakes supercharges these universal themes and holds audience interest incredibly well.”

Both Mayberry and Gist have extensive experience as screenwriters, particularly on the recently-axed serial Neighbours, but they still found the new format a sharp learning curve. “The pace of it and the slickness of it is the challenge,” she says. “We’re still learning with every one. How to make it as exciting and emotional as we can within a minute thirty.”

“You’re dealing with a distracted viewer a lot of the time,” she adds. “They might be on a second screen, on public transport, going to bed – so you’ve got to keep it fast paced and shifting. You might have three changes of music in a minute. They also might put funny sound effects in there as well to really underline moments. So that stuff is really different from storytelling we’ve done.”

“Vertical changes every day. It’s incredibly volatile. In China this is a very mature segment of media. We’re not there at all in the West but there’s this constant push to feed the pipeline, minimise risk (production budgets but also content). It’s all about milking as much out of the sector as possible. There are some people in vertical trying to lift the bar in terms of what gets made but at the end of the day it’s about numbers and money. Everyone’s competing for eyeballs. Visibility is very hard. There are apps with huge eye subscriber rates and apps very much in infancy with subscriber rates. Lots of money is spent on advertising.” 

Gist points out there are a number of misconceptions about verticals. “One of them is that the production values are invariably really poor but that isn’t true,” he says. “Some producers make a big effort to have them look as good as possible. Also, the companies dabble in a range of genres, it’s not just romance.”

When asked what the pay was like for writers in Australia, Mayberry says, “There’s a lower end and a reasonable end. In terms of making a living from it you’d have to do a lot of them. I don’t think it’s a lifeline for any writer out there thinking this is going to replace their regular gig on Neighbours.”

Mayberry and Gist write English-language verticals that “print as North American” which are aimed at the international market, particularly the US, South America, Spain, the Philippines and Indonesia. “There’s lots of people in the world with a phone but not a TV,” says Mayberry.  

Mayberry admits she’s unsure about the potential of verticals for the Australian market. “Verticals haven’t really gripped Australian audiences from what we’re hearing,” she says. “People are seeing them but aren’t addicted to them as other nationalities.” However, as Gist acknowledges, “It’s a sunrise industry and they’re still working out what works best.” 

One thing that could help the production of verticals in Australia, says Mayberry, would be a set of standardised rates from the different guilds for working in the format. “In America the guilds have created a rate card, but that hasn’t happened in Australia yet. That would give people a lot more clarity as well as giving people protections.”

When asked about the future of the format, Mayberry admits with a laugh, “I have absolutely no idea. For the first time in my career, I feel like I’m at the beginning of the wave. How it’s going to evolve, who’s going to jump into the mix, how people will pay for it, I don’t know. Are Australians going to start watching them at the same rate? I don’t know.”

“I’m interested to see if it will carve out its own unique space but it’s still a growth industry. And at the moment everyone is looking at it.”

By Stephen Vagg