Make great vertical drama.
We’ll take care of the rest.

The format

CliffPop is a home for mini-drama — vertical, episodic fiction designed to be watched on a phone, in short bursts, one cliffhanger at a time. The shape of the format is deliberate, and it’s the most important thing to internalise before you shoot a frame.

Cliffhangers

Vertical drama lives or dies on the moment after the last frame — that’s when a viewer either spends a credit on the next episode or closes the app. So cliffhangers are central to the format, and a series needs a healthy density of them: reveals, confrontations, doors opening, truths landing wrong, choices the viewer is desperate to see resolved.

That doesn’t mean every episode has to end on one. Stories need room to breathe — setup beats, character work, the slow burn before the payoff. A series that detonates at the end of every episode runs out of altitude fast; a series with no hooks loses the audience before the good stuff lands. Aim for most episodes ending on a strong pull-through — not always a full reveal, but at least a clear reason the viewer wants the next one — and reserve the big swings for the moments they earn.

Build the hook into the structure, not the edit. If the script doesn’t give the viewer a reason to tap "next", the cut can’t save it.

Filming

Camera

• Resolution: Delivery will be at 1080×1920. 4K vertical (2160×3840) preferred for headroom in the edit but not for delivery.
• Frame rate: 24p or 25p for cinematic feel; 30/60p acceptable. Avoid mixing rates within a series.
• Codec at capture: shoot in the highest-quality codec your camera supports (ProRes, H.265 10-bit, BRAW). Don’t shoot in a delivery-grade codec.
• Stability: handheld is fine when motivated. If your blocking calls for static, use a tripod or gimbal.

Composition for vertical

• Frame for face and chest. The audience watches one performer at a time.
• Two-shots are hard in 9:16. Use over-the-shoulder, intercutting, or stacked blocking instead of stuffing both actors in one frame.
• Leave headroom at the top and breathing room at the bottom — UI overlays sometimes appear in the lower 12% of the frame on certain devices.
• Avoid fine subtitled text near the edges. Phones crop more than you think.

Sound

• Dialogue: lavalier or boom on every speaking actor. Phone / Camera mic dialogue should be avoided for best quality. It might be rejected at QC.
• Levels: mix for an integrated loudness of −14 LUFS (Loudness Units Full Scale) with a maximum true peak level of −1.0 dBFS to −2.0 dBFS to prevent distortion during transcoding.
• Music: use original, licensed, or royalty-free tracks where rights are clearly granted for global commercial streaming. Save your licence proofs — we may ask.

Lighting

• If you can see your actor’s eyes clearly, you’re probably fine.
• Avoid mixed colour temperatures unless it’s a deliberate look. Phones expose the mistake.
• Night exterior on a phone screen is a stress test. Build extra contrast and key light into anything dark.

Editing

Vertical drama is cut harder, faster, and earlier than long-form. Three minutes is a long time when every cut has to earn its place.

• Open on motion or stakes. The first three seconds decide whether a viewer keeps watching. Don’t open on a logo, a slow pan, or a credits card.
• Shorter scenes. If a scene runs longer than 30 seconds in mini-drama, ask whether you’re holding the audience or testing them.
• Cut on the line, not after it. Tail-end pauses bleed momentum.
• Reveal late. Hold the moment of clarity for the last possible second of the episode.
• Music as engine. A score that builds across the episode pulls a viewer toward the cliffhanger.
• Subtitles: burned-in subs are not required. We add platform-rendered subtitles after acceptance.
• Colour: grade for an OLED phone screen, not a calibrated monitor. Test on a real phone before delivery.

Delivery spec

Episodes are uploaded one at a time (or full series, drag and drop) through your creator portal. Our pipeline transcodes every file to three adaptive HLS bitrates and serves it through our CDN. To make that work cleanly, deliver to spec.

Naming

Use clear, sequential filenames so the bulk uploader can place them correctly. Any of these formats works:

• S01E01.mp4, S01E02.mp4… (preferred - matches TV convention)
• S0101.mp4, S0102.mp4… (no E separator; same idea)
• Episode1.mp4, Episode2.mp4… (legacy, still accepted)

Anything else in the filename - titles, descriptions, language tags - is ignored. Episode titles are entered when reviewing the upload, so non-Latin scripts and accented characters work correctly without relying on filename encoding.

Artwork

• Series thumbnail: 1080×1920 (vertical poster), JPG or PNG.
• Hero image: 1920×800 (horizontal banner), JPG or PNG.
• Title text on artwork is fine; avoid heavy overlay UI elements.

2. Once accepted — the creator portal

When your pitch is accepted, your account is upgraded to a creator account and you get access to the creator portal. That’s where the real work begins.

• Upload episodes one at a time, or bulk-drop a season’s worth in one go.
• Set the unlock pricing — a base tier for the series, plus per-episode overrides where it makes sense (see Pricing & free episodes below).
• Manage artwork, titles, synopses, and replace files when you need to update a cut.
• Track viewership and earnings per series, per episode, per day.

Pricing & free episodes

Every series on CliffPop opens with at least one free episode so a new viewer can start watching without spending a token. From there you control the economics.

• Episode 1 is always free. Anyone arriving on your series can watch the first episode end-to-end at no cost. This is a platform-level guarantee — you can’t turn it off, and you don’t need to.
• The trailer, if you upload one, is also free. Trailers are a separate slot above episode 1 on the series page; they never cost tokens and never appear in your earnings because they’re not unlocks.
• We recommend a reasonable proportion of free episodes — enough to give a viewer a real taste of the series before they decide to commit. There’s no magic number, but most series that find an audience open with more than just episode 1 free. The shape of your story dictates where the hook is; price the paywall to land just after it.
• Beyond episode 1, the free window is yours to set. Two, three, five free episodes — whatever fits the rhythm of your series. You can change it any time from the creator portal; existing unlocks aren’t affected.
• Branched episodes are always paid. If your series has a Twist with two (or more) paths, every branch after the choice costs tokens — even if it would otherwise fall inside your free window, and even if you set a per-episode override. The minimum on any branched episode is 1 token. The viewer’s choice itself is the value, so both paths need to carry weight — if one branch were free, the choice collapses.
• The Twist episode itself follows the normal free rules. A “Twist” is just a regular shared episode whose ending presents the fork. If that episode falls inside your free window, it’s free to watch end-to-end — only the branches AFTER the choice cost tokens. Many creators deliberately put their first Twist inside the free window so the paywall lands at the moment the viewer makes their first emotional commitment, not before.

Tier and per-episode pricing

Token cost per unlock is set by a base tier on the series, with the option to override individual episodes when the story calls for it.

• Lite — 20 tokens/episode. Lower friction, broader top-of-funnel. Good for new series finding their audience or shorter-form work where a binge is affordable.
• Standard — 30 tokens/episode. The default for most series — in line with what viewers expect for premium vertical drama.
• High — 40 tokens/episode. Premium positioning. Best suited to high-production-value work or established series with proven retention.
• Per-episode override. Any episode can be priced individually — common uses are a Standard-tier series with a High-priced finale, or a one-off premium episode mid-season. The override applies only to that episode; the rest of the series stays on its base tier.

Whatever tier or override you set, your tiered revenue share (50% of net revenue up to €7,000 of a series’ monthly gross, 60% above) is applied to that revenue. Each closed month settles at the rates in force then — so changing pricing forward doesn’t re-rate earnings already settled.

The QC review process

Every episode you upload goes through CliffPop’s quality control review before it goes live. We’re not gatekeeping taste — we’re protecting the standard that the platform is built on.

• Technical pass: resolution, audio levels, encoding integrity, aspect ratio, no broken cuts.
• Editorial pass: cliffhanger structure, pacing, opening hook.
• Standards pass: content compliance against the rules in the next section.

Most episodes pass on first submission. When they don’t, we come back with specific notes — not vague rejection. Fix, re-upload, ship.

Content standards

CliffPop is a fiction platform. The rules below exist to keep it that way — and to keep it a place where audiences and creators can both feel respected.

What we publish

• Fiction, in all its colours. Romance, thriller, fantasy, comedy, period drama, science fiction, horror, slice-of-life. If it’s a story, it has a home here.
• Adult themes, handled with intention. Sensual, romantic, and mature storytelling is welcome — the kind of charged-but-tasteful work that lives comfortably alongside mainstream streaming drama. Heat, chemistry, intimacy, longing — all on the table when they serve the story.
• Difficult subject matter. Grief, addiction, violence, abuse and trauma can be portrayed when they’re part of an honest fictional narrative. Context and craft matter.

What we don’t publish

• Sexually explicit pornography, full-frontal nudity, or content whose primary purpose is sexual gratification rather than narrative.
• Any sexual or suggestive content involving minors. Zero tolerance, zero exceptions.
• Content that promotes, glorifies, or instructs real-world violence, self-harm, or hate against people based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or nationality.
• Defamation of real, identifiable people.
• Material that infringes someone else’s copyright, trademark, or likeness rights without proper clearance.
• Documentary, reaction, or non-fiction content. CliffPop is for stories.
• Anything illegal under Maltese or EU law, or under the law of the country where the work was produced.

The simple rule: if the work is fiction, treats its subject matter with craft, and respects the people watching it — you’re inside the lines. If it sets out to shock, exploit, or harm, you’re not.

Earnings & payouts

The headline number lives on our Earnings page. Your share of net revenue (viewer payments after taxes and platform fees) is tiered, assessed per series, per calendar month:

• 50% of net revenue on the first €7,000 a series grosses in a calendar month.
• 60% of net revenue on every euro that series grosses above €7,000 in the same month.

The tiers are marginal — only the revenue past the threshold earns 60%, so a series never loses by growing. The split is the same for a new creator and the biggest title on the platform, and it moves in your favour exactly when a series is doing well. Promote your series hard: CliffPop is a pure distribution platform (you can run the same series anywhere else too), and the better it performs here, the more of it you keep.*

*Paid credits only. Promotional credits — the welcome bonus on sign-up, daily-login streaks, occasional campaign gifts — cost the viewer nothing and so generate no underlying revenue and no creator earnings on that unlock. CliffPop carries the cost of those engagement promos directly, which is exactly why we can run an honest 50% base rate and still hand 60% to a series on its best months instead of compressing to fund retention. “Net” here means the revenue the platform actually keeps after taxes (VAT) and any platform fees (e.g. in-app-purchase commissions on mobile billing) — creator and platform share those deductions proportionally rather than the platform absorbing them. Every unlock in your dashboard cites the credit batch it came from (paid or promo), so the picture is always auditable per-row. In practice, the vast majority of unlocks on a series that finds an audience come from paid credits — the promo pool gets viewers started, binge behaviour does the rest.

How payouts work

• Earnings accumulate in your creator account in real time. Every unlock is logged the moment it happens, and your dashboard shows the total per series, per episode, and per day.
• Earnings are settled per series, per calendar month. Once a month closes and its figures are final, we apply the tiered split and the month’s earnings are locked - a later rate change never re-rates a settled month.
• Payouts run monthly, in arrears. A month is left to settle, then paid the month after - so June’s earnings settle once June closes and are paid during July. This buffer absorbs viewer refunds before money goes out.
• Payouts are issued in EUR. We recommend you set up a Stripe account and connect it for earnings transfer: it is the fastest method and carries the lowest fees for both you and CliffPop. Bank transfer can be arranged as an alternative. Standard payment-processing and currency fees apply at the point of transfer; your revenue-share rate itself is never reduced.
• Every payout comes with a statement listing the unlocks that contributed, so you can reconcile against your dashboard.

*Cadence is monthly in arrears. The first payout is delayed by one cycle so we have a full closed month to draw from — this is standard for streaming royalties and prevents reconciling-and-clawing-back after viewer refunds.