Fund your production. Earn from every unlock.
CliffPop is a distribution platform, not a production financier — we don’t put capital into productions and we never take ownership of the IP. What we offer is the other side of the equation: a creator-aligned home with a tiered revenue share — 50% of net revenue on every paid unlock, rising to 60% on the months a series performs strongly — and no exclusivity lock, so you can distribute the same series anywhere else too. This page is the financial picture for a producer or investor weighing where to send a production.
Safe central estimate for a sane Western production. Industry range: €1,400–€3,700/min.
Finished minutes captured per shoot day on a micro-drama unit.
Matches the widely-cited “€140–275k per series, 8–10 day shoot” ReelShort benchmark.
Where Holywater shoots much of My Drama. CliffPop's premium tier benchmark.
What you’re buying into — and what you’re not
To be explicit up front: CliffPop is not a production partner. We do not contribute capital to your production, we do not take an equity stake, and we never own any part of the IP. You (or your fund, family office, or production company) finance the production in full and retain everything you produce. What CliffPop offers is the distribution side: a curated audience, a transparent revenue-share model that rewards strong performance, and the marketing infrastructure to launch your title properly.
You fund the production
Capital comes from you and your financing stack. CliffPop contributes nothing to the budget. Production planning, shooting, and post-production are entirely yours to run (or to commission with a production-services partner of your choice). The cost figures on this page exist to help you size that budget realistically.
You keep 100% of your IP
CliffPop never takes an ownership share. The relationship with the platform is purely distribution: you sign a non-exclusive publishing agreement granting CliffPop the right to stream the series. Format rights, regional licensing, sequels, spin-offs, adaptations — and the freedom to run the same series on any other platform — are entirely yours throughout.
Strong months earn 60%
The on-platform economics. A series earns the creator 50% of net revenue on the first €7,000 it grosses in a calendar month, and 60% on every euro above that — marginal, so growth is never penalised. Far above the typical 0.7–1.2× one-time license fee ReelShort or DramaBox pay for finished work, and there is no exclusivity lock: you keep distributing wherever you like.
The rates above are CliffPop’s standard creator terms and apply equally to any qualifying production published on the platform — large or small, debut creator or established production house.
What a vertical drama actually costs
The category is priced by finished minute, not by episode count. Inside the 60–120-second episode window, per-episode cost barely moves with run length. Two flagship formats anchor the slate — a 40-episode pilot and an 80-episode flagship — with shoot lengths and budgets that scale sub-linearly.
40 episodes
40 × 90s = 60 minutes of finished content
Pilot / test-series sweet spot. 6–8 shoot days. Useful as a creator-pipeline qualifier or to validate a new genre lane before committing to a full 80-ep run.
80 episodes Flagship
80 × 90s = 120 minutes of finished content
The commercial sweet spot for ReelShort / DramaBox-tier originals. 10–14 shoot days. CliffPop’s premium tier targets this run-length.
Fixed costs amortise: script, casting, location scouting, art-department builds, and insurance all scale sub-linearly. Cast leads are typically booked for the full shoot regardless of run length — doubling episodes adds day-player and extras spend, not headline talent. Plan 1.6–1.8× a 40-ep budget for an 80-ep series, not 2×. Each additional shoot day runs ~€14–23k all-in.
Where the money goes
A standard 80-episode series, shot in 8–10 days. Cast and crew dominate; everything else is comparatively small.
Bars indicate proportional share of total budget; widths normalised to the highest band of each bucket’s range.
The biggest lever isn’t talent. It’s location.
Same 80-episode, 120-minute series. Same finished product. The shooting location moves the all-in budget by a factor of 4×. This is the single most important variable in budgeting any production targeting this category.
- China · Hengdian €45–110k
Cheapest by far. Established micro-drama infrastructure.
- Eastern Europe €90–185k
Ukraine, Poland, Romania. Where Holywater shoots My Drama.
- Malta ★ €110–200k net of rebate
English-native. 40% cash rebate kicks in over €200k qualifying spend. Below the threshold, comparable to Eastern Europe; above it, net of rebate undercuts it — while keeping a Western-grade look and full English-language production.
- US right-to-work €185–275k
Atlanta, Texas. Non-union or hybrid crews.
- LA · non-union / full union €230–460k+
SAG new-media tier €230–370k; full union €460k+.
Stacking non-dilutive capital
Independent of any platform conversation, productions in this category benefit from a layered financing stack. None of the below is administered by CliffPop — these are public funds and rebate schemes the producer (or their production services partner) applies for directly. We list them because they materially change the equity slice a producer needs to raise, and shooting from Malta in particular puts most of them in reach from the same jurisdiction:
- Malta 40% cash rebate. Reimbursed against qualifying spend over €200k. Trims a €230k Western-grade flagship to roughly €110–165k net of rebate. Cash, not a tax credit — received as a payment after delivery.
- EU MEDIA — Creative Europe. Development and distribution grants for European audiovisual works. Can cover script, development, and audience-engagement spend ahead of principal photography.
- Eurimages. Co-production support fund of the Council of Europe. Suited to qualifying productions structured across multiple European partners.
- Maltese co-production funds + producer incentives. Additional local incentives stack on top of the cash rebate for productions structured under Maltese co-production arrangements.
Stacked appropriately, more than half of a premium-tier budget can close non-dilutively — reducing the equity slice the producer needs to raise. Eligibility, qualifying spend, and application timelines vary per programme. CliffPop is not party to any of these arrangements; we list them because producers planning to publish on platform routinely use them and the picture matters to anyone budgeting a flagship.
How producers earn on platform
Three revenue surfaces flow back to a production published on CliffPop. None of them require giving up IP or equity — they’re straight outcomes of the publishing relationship.
50% of net revenue, 60% on strong months
Every paid unlock on CliffPop counts toward its series’ monthly gross. The creator earns 50% of net revenue* on the first €7,000 of that series’ gross in a calendar month, and 60% on every euro above — marginal, assessed fresh each month. “Net” is 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. These are the same standard rates every creator on the platform sees; they don’t change based on production budget or who financed it.
Settled after each month closes and paid the following month; transactions are visible per-row (token batch, viewer, episode, earnings) in the creator dashboard. *See “Paid vs. promo credits” below.
You keep everything
The publishing agreement grants CliffPop a non-exclusive right to stream the series — nothing else. Format rights, regional licensing, translation and dubbing rights, sequel and spin-off rights, adaptation rights, merchandising, every downstream right stays with you. There is no exclusivity period: you can run the same series on any other platform, at any time, in parallel with its availability on CliffPop.
CliffPop does not negotiate equity, sequel-rights options, or first-look deals as part of any publishing agreement. What you build, you keep.
Spotlight, featured, and IG distribution
Series published on platform are slotted into the editorial-driven Spotlight and Featured catalogues — curated by humans, not algorithmic recommendation. Each episode is processed through the in-house Instagram caption + reel-render pipeline for organic social distribution, and series-level marketing campaigns ride on top. The bigger the production, the more our editorial team treats the launch like a house release.
Discovery surfaces are how a CliffPop series outperforms its first-week numbers. Algorithmic platforms can’t guarantee editorial placement; we can.
How the split actually works — paid vs. promo credits
A note on the asterisk in section 01 above, because it shapes the revenue projection you should model when budgeting against on-platform earnings. The tiered on-platform share applies to paid credits — tokens purchased through Stripe checkout at the published euro-per-token price. CliffPop also issues promotional credits: 50 on registration as a welcome bonus, 10 per day as a daily-login streak, plus occasional campaign grants. Those promotional credits cost the viewer nothing.
When a viewer unlocks an episode using promotional credits, no euro has crossed the platform — so no creator-earnings row is written for that unlock. The token batch is recorded with a €0 cost basis. Paid credits earn at the tiered rate; promo credits earn at €0. Every unlock in the production dashboard cites the specific token batch (and its cost basis) it was generated from, so the picture is transparent on a per-row basis.
Most vertical-drama platforms in this category bundle promotional-credit costs into the creator pool — meaning the headline revenue share has to compress to fund retention spending. CliffPop carries promo costs directly on the platform’s P&L. That budgetary segregation is the reason the rate can run an honest 50% base and reward strong months at 60%, rather than the whole split compressing over time. Producers benefit from a stable, predictable per-paid-unlock economic that doesn’t need to be renegotiated as retention spending scales.
In practice, on any series that finds an audience, the vast majority of unlocks come from paid credits. Promo credits get a viewer started; binge behaviour quickly outpaces the 50-credit welcome bonus and the 10-credit daily streak. The promo pool is engagement infrastructure that surfaces new viewers to your title and gets them through their first episodes; the moment they commit to the catalogue, every subsequent unlock is paid.
Producer-facing revenue projections, where shared, are built on paid-token unlock assumptions. Promo unlocks are modelled separately and treated as platform-funded discovery spend, not as a discount applied to the headline split.
Why this exists at all — publish-and-keep vs. license-and-sell
Two different commercial models are open to a producer of a vertical-drama series. The structural difference between them is the entire point of this page.
License-and-sell. The major vertical-drama platforms (ReelShort, DramaBox) fund their own productions directly and own the IP outright on those. When they do license finished work from independent producers, the typical offer is 0.7–1.2× production cost as a one-off license fee, sometimes with revenue-share upside if a title hits — but the IP transfers, and the producer is out of the picture after the check clears.
Publish-and-keep. CliffPop runs the other model. We don’t fund production and we don’t take IP. You finance the series in full, retain everything you produce, distribute it anywhere you like, and publish on platform under a non-exclusive agreement that pays 50% of net revenue on paid unlocks, rising to 60% on the months a series grosses past €7,000. There’s no licensing margin in the middle and no platform stake eroding your downstream rights.
Which model wins depends on the title. A series the licensing platforms covet might get a quick license offer at 1.2× cost, and that’s a real outcome — capital recovered fast. A title that finds an audience over time, though, earns more under the publish-and-keep model than it ever would under the one-off license — and the IP stays with the producer for sequels, format sales, regional licensing, and everything else that compounds over a decade.
Two production scales that fit the catalogue
Productions across a wide budget range are welcome on platform. Two scales fit the catalogue particularly well, both eligible for the same tiered paid-unlock revenue share.
20–40 episode series · €9–18k
High-cadence, low-risk format validation. Lean Eastern European or Malta-volume shoots. Useful as a creator getting going at scale, or proving out a new genre lane before committing to a flagship budget. The same publishing terms apply.
80-episode flagships · €185–275k Western-grade
The commercial sweet spot for vertical drama. Produced from Malta, the 40% cash rebate trims that to roughly €110–165k net of rebate while keeping a Western-grade look and an English-language production. The titles most likely to anchor the editorial Spotlight surface tend to land here.
What happens after you get in touch
- Intro call. What you’re planning to produce, who’s producing it, where you’re shooting, when. Whether the catalogue fit makes sense for both sides.
- Publishing-terms briefing. The standard creator distribution agreement (non-exclusive, tiered paid-unlock revenue share, IP retained by you) plus any flagship-tier additions where relevant — editorial commitments, launch-window scheduling, marketing support scope.
- Production runs on your side. You finance, produce, and deliver the series. CliffPop is not involved in production decisions or capital deployment. If you need introductions to Maltese production-services partners or guidance on rebate timing, we’re happy to help — but the production company you work with is yours to choose.
- Distribution agreement signed. A standard creator publishing agreement (with any flagship-tier additions agreed in step 2) is signed ahead of delivery. Bespoke clauses are limited — the terms above are the terms.
- Launch + live earnings reporting. Episodes are reviewed, slotted into the appropriate editorial surface, and published. From launch onward you see transactional-grade per-row reporting on unlocks, viewers, regions, and earnings, with monthly creator-cadence payouts.
Important
This page describes the publishing relationship under which a producer can release a self-financed vertical-drama series on CliffPop. CliffPop does not invest in productions, does not co-finance, does not take equity, and does not hold any IP in the series it publishes. Nothing on this page is a securities offering, a solicitation of investment in CliffPop the platform, or an offer to fund any third-party production. The relationship between CliffPop and any producer is governed by a standard creator distribution agreement executed in Malta; the revenue-share rates referenced are CliffPop’s standard creator terms and apply to qualifying productions across the catalogue. Cost figures shown are illustrative, based on industry-standard 2025–26 rates and CliffPop’s internal model — actual production costs vary by location, run-length, and production-design specification. No representation is made that any specific title will earn at any specific rate. Prior titles’ performance is not indicative of future results.
Bring your production home.
If you’re financing a vertical-drama series, planning one, or weighing publishing options against a license-to-sell offer — talk to us before you commit. The publishing terms above are the terms; the catalogue conversation is what we’d like to have.
productions@cliffpop.com