Meta’s new Reels feature plays into the microdrama market

As microseries take over digital content and Hollywood and YouTube leans ever harder into being the face of TV, Meta is playing into both trends with a new feature for Reels.

“Series” will let creators organize their individually uploaded Reels into a chronological collection of episodes. Creators who use the feature will have their series highlighted in a special hub on their profiles, TechCrunch reports.

Viewers can either find the series there–or, if they discover an episode while organically scrolling, Reels will show them an option to tap for the full series. Users can also save a series to their accounts, giving them a way to watch later if they have to pause, and to check in for new installments.

Since TikTok’s COVID-days debut, short-form content has struggled with serialization. For a while, creators couldn’t even link out to other videos from their shorts, and some platforms’ UXs still don’t show short-form videos’ titles when browsing creators’ profiles. This leads to problems like a viewer being served episode #20 in a series they haven’t seen before, and being unable to find previous installments–so the creator ultimately loses viewership from someone who might have been interested.

With microseries becoming more popular and dedicated apps like ReelShort providing serialized short shows, viewers are likely looking to social platforms to emulate that viewership experience and make creator content easier to watch.

This sort of feature (which TikTok already has) is a win for creators who want to serialize short content while building their audience with as little friction as possible.

Meta also says it’s exploring how to monetize the Series feature; it didn’t say what kind of monetization might manifest, but TechCrunch points out that TikTok’s similar feature lets creators paywall entire collections of premium content, so that’s a possible future here.

Meta did tell TechCrunch that it introduced this feature because it’s already seeing serialized content boom on Reels.

For now, the Series feature is in a testing phase with select creators and content publishers who already post serialized content on Instagram and Facebook. No word on when it might roll out to the general creator base, but we expect a stir when it does.