Quibi Failed. Instagram Won’t. Here’s Why That Changes Everything For Your Career.

Why every platform is now in the storytelling business. And what writers and filmmakers must know now.

Raquelle David
Jun 24, 2026

Welcome to New Story. I’m Raquelle David — a Hollywood literary manager with nearly twenty years inside the industry. Every week I pull back the curtain on how this business actually works. If you’re new here, subscribe below.

Photo by Niklas König on Unsplash

Remember Quibi?

$1.75 billion raised. Founded and ran by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro were just some of the biggest names in Hollywood making content for it. The premise was simple — short form, high quality episodic storytelling built specifically for your phone.

It lasted six months.

And the conventional wisdom at the time was that short form narrative was simply a bad idea. That audiences didn’t want to watch scripted stories in short chunks on their phones and that the format just simply didn’t work.

But that wasn’t the problem at all.

The problem was that Quibi asked people to change their behavior. To download a new app. To build a new habit around a platform they had no existing relationship with.

The idea wasn’t wrong. The timing was wrong (yes, Covid). But importantly the platform was wrong.

And this week, that idea got validated in the biggest possible way — on a platform 2.4 billion people already use every day.

The Numbers Nobody In Traditional Hollywood Is Talking About

Before we get to Instagram, let’s talk about what’s already happening. Because the shift I’m describing isn’t coming. It’s already here, in a big way — and the scale of it is genuinely staggering.

Vertical platforms like ReelShort and DramaBox that stream serialized episodes of one to three minutes, filmed vertically for your phone — generated $2.98 billion in in-app purchase revenue in 2025. Up 115% year over year. It’s no surprise these are the third fastest growing apps on the planet.

DramaBox has 44 million monthly active users — to put it into perspective, that’s more than Hulu and Paramount+. ReelShort users spend an average of 35.7 minutes per day inside the app — kinda like the amount of time we try to limit ourselves to daily on social media, right? We are all guilty of doomscrolling each day and those minutes stack up.

The Vertical industry is projected to reach $26 billion in annual revenue by 2030.

So yeah, this isn’t a niche. This is a restructuring of the global entertainment economy happening largely outside the view of traditional Hollywood — and traditional Hollywood is now scrambling to catch up. Fox just bought equity in a vertical drama platform. Paramount, Lionsgate, and Hallmark are all doing deals with ReelShort too.

Every Screen Is Now A Stage

And now Instagram entered the conversation.

Yesterday Instagram announced it’s testing longform episodic storytelling on TV. Not on your phone — on your actual television. Amazon Fire TV. Google TV. Samsung TVs. A new Series tool that lets creators bundle Reels into sequential, bingeable episodes with cliffhangers and seasonal arcs. A $1.3 billion micro-drama market that Instagram is now actively recruiting its creators to build for.

It’s sister TikTok has been developing PineDrama — its own dedicated short-form drama app — and signed a deal with Issa Rae’s production company HOORAE to develop content for it.

And very importantly, YouTube became the most-watched video provider in the United States in 2025 — beating Netflix and HBO — and it did it on the TV screen, not the phone.

Also, Netflix has started to sign video podcast deals signaling a push more into socials.

In the space of eighteen months, every major platform has made the same bet simultaneously. Storytelling belongs everywhere, and the screens people already use every day are becoming the infrastructure for narrative content whether traditional Hollywood is ready for it or not.

Why This Time Is Different From Quibi

Quibi failed because it forced behavior change. It asked you to go somewhere new, learn something new, and build a habit around a product that had no existing relationship with your life.

Instagram doesn’t have that problem. Neither does TikTok. Neither does YouTube. We’re already on it; it’s part of our daily lives, our daily rituals. And it’s just got easier to consume content.

These platforms already have billions of people showing up every single day out of pure habit. They’re not asking anyone to change their behavior. They’re adding storytelling infrastructure to behavior that already exists.

And here’s what makes this moment even more significant especially for storytellers. These platforms don’t just distribute stories — they’ve already proven they can launch careers and create cultural phenomena that rival anything traditional Hollywood produces.

YouTube Already Proved This. Twice.

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen two debut feature films break box office records — Curry Barker got his start through uploading his short film, skits and self-funded feature to YouTube — it gave him a body of work, a proof of concept, and the creative confidence to make a film that ended up being Focus Features’ highest grossing film of all time.

Backrooms is the same story. Kane Parsons built 80 million YouTube views before a single frame of his feature film existed. YouTube didn’t discover him and hand him a deal. It gave him the infrastructure to build his own audience from scratch and Hollywood came to him.

These aren’t flukes. They’re a pattern. And that pattern is now being actively replicated and expanded across every major platform simultaneously.

Hollywood’s Reps Are Restructuring Around This

Perhaps the most telling signal of all isn’t coming from the platforms themselves — it’s coming from how the rep business I work in is shifting to digital in a big way.

In May, Tanya Cohen — a partner at Range Media Partners — left to become co-CEO of Made By Us Studios, a new Hollywood-grade studio built entirely around the creator economy. The studio works with creators who have a combined 1.5 billion followers, and it’s built on the premise that creators should be full partners in IP ownership and monetization rather than just talent to be packaged and sold.

Her explanation for the move was: “The creator economy is no longer adjacent to Hollywood; it’s becoming its operating system.”

When someone with Tanya’s career trajectory makes that specific move and says those specific words publicly — that’s not a career pivot. That’s a signal about where the power in this industry is actually moving. And I think we all need to sit up and take notice.

Does it mean I am done with the traditional storyteller client? Hell no. Does it mean I am scouring for the next Kane Parsons on YouTube? Well maybe, but not in the way you think. Because a smart rep is not just about discovery; they’re about building with their clients and taking notice of what's available to them. But I do need writers and filmmakers to hear this — the way forward is going to be led by you.

What This Actually Means For Writers and Filmmakers

New platforms mean new buyers. And new buyers mean new opportunities for writers and filmmakers who understand how to write for them.

The micro-drama and vertical drama format requires a specific kind of craft — serialized episodes of one to three minutes, built around cliffhangers, designed for a viewer who might be watching on their couch one night and their phone the next morning. It borrows from television. It borrows from social media. And it requires something most traditional television writers have never thought about and most social media creators don’t fully understand yet.

That gap is where the opportunity lives right now.

ReelShort is producing 400 shows in 2026. All filmed in Los Angeles. The money is terrible, there’s no creative input so the deals are bad, but hey work is work? But let’s face it - an entire production economy is running at scale in LA that most people in the traditional industry don’t even know exists.

And on the Instagram and TikTok side, the shift is even more democratized — platforms are actively recruiting creators who already have audiences to start thinking in episodes. Think recurring characters, narrative arcs, cliffhangers that pull viewers back. This isn’t cheap one-and-done Verticals, we’re talking real storytelling possibilities.

The writers and filmmakers who are going to have the most options in the next three to five years are the ones who understand multiple formats. Who can write a pilot and pitch it to a streamer but who can also think in episodes of two minutes and understand what makes someone tap for the next one at 11pm on their couch.

The Window Is Open. It Won’t Stay Open Indefinitely.

Quibi’s failure convinced a lot of people that short form narrative was a dead end. That was wrong. And anyone who quietly kept developing in that space while everyone else dismissed it now has a significant head start.

Instagram and TikTok entering this space simultaneously, with real money and real infrastructure behind them, is the signal that the window is genuinely open right now. The major studios are starting to make equity bets rather than just pilot experiments — which historically means the early positioning window is closing, not opening.

This isn’t a retreat from craft. It’s an expansion of what craft means in 2026.

The screens people already use every day are now stages. The question for writers and filmmakers isn’t whether this changes things. And I think it does. The question is whether you’re going to be early to this conversation or late to it?