It’s about time that the microdrama trend has gone mainstream.

As microdrama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox quietly rake in billions, Peacock announced on Monday that’s launching two unscripted Bravo microdramas, which will stream on its app. These are vertical video series, with episodes around 60 to 90 seconds, are designed for a quick, TikTok-like viewing experience.

“Salon Confessionals with Madison LeCroy” will feature the “Southern Charm” star as she gives her clients a makeover while they tell her their most dramatic stories. “Campus Confidential: Miami” spotlights a group of college students including Georgia Gay, daughter of Heather Gay from “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”

According to Peacock, this marks the first time that a major U.S. streaming platform has produced microdramas — and it was bound to happen.

First popularized in China, microdrama apps are poised to have a breakout year in the U.S. app market. According to the app intelligence firm Appfigures, ReelShort reached roughly $1.2 billion in gross consumer spending in 2025, up 119% from 2024; another leading app, DramaBox, made $276 million in gross consumer spending last year, more than doubling its 2024 numbers.

Earlier this year, TikTok launched a standalone microdrama app called PineDrama. Another microdrama app run by Hollywood veterans called GammaTime raised $14 million in funding, including angel checks from Alexis Ohanian, Kris Jenner, and Kim Kardashian.

Many of the existing microdrama apps, however, are putting out shows that are — how can we put it nicely? — terrible. This stuff makes “Riverdale” seem like a highly intellectual, prestige HBO show. We’re not talking about “bad TV” as in, how you might feel slightly sheepish about your “Real Housewives” obsession. We’re talking about a formulaic content machine that generates thousands of shows about a poor, nerdy girl who gets bullied, but when she gets pushed to the ground, her glasses fall off, and some billionaire (who is possibly a werewolf) realizes she’s pretty (or, his werewolf mate) and falls in love with her.

And yet, people can’t seem to get enough and subscribe to watch these addictive microdramas, paying $20 per week in some cases to find out what happens next after some crazy cliffhanger.

This collaboration between Peacock and Bravo could prove clever, though. These two shows have built-in audiences made up of Bravo fanatics, who are already going to the Peacock app to watch established series they love, like “Vanderpump Rules.” Peacock is betting that while they’re already on the app, they’ll be enticed to watch a minute-long video of Madison LeCroy giving someone a makeover while they spill the tea.

Digg is back from the dead. Again.

Just months after launching, the reboot of Kevin Rose’s once-popular link-sharing site shut down in March, as the company shifted course. Originally redesigned as a competitor to the massive community forum site Reddit, the new Digg found that it wasn’t able to effectively manage the bot traffic invading its platform and hadn’t differentiated itself enough from the competition to make an impact.

The startup laid off staff and said it was time to go back to the drawing board. Rose, a partner at True Ventures, returned to work full-time on a new version of Digg in April.

On Friday evening, the founder previewed a link to the newly redesigned Digg, which now looks nothing like a Reddit clone and more like the news aggregator it once was.

This time around, the site is focused on ranking news — specifically, AI news to start.

In an email to beta testers, the company said the site’s goal is to “track the most influential voices in a space” and to surface the news that’s actually worth “paying attention to.” AI is the area it’s testing this idea with, but if successful, Digg will expand to include other topics.

The email warned that the site was still raw and “buggy,” and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as its public debut.

On the current homepage, Digg showcases four main stories at the top: the most viewed story, a story seeing rising discussion, the fastest-climbing story, and one “In case you missed it” headline.

Below that is a ranked list of top stories for the day, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But the twist is that these metrics aren’t the ones generated on Digg itself. Instead, Digg is ingesting content from X in real-time to determine what’s being discussed, while also performing sentiment analysis, clustering, and signal detection to determine what matters most.

As Rose remarked on X, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman engages with a story about AI, it almost always sets off a chain reaction that includes deep discussion and propagation of that topic throughout X. The new Digg will be able to track that increased engagement.

This might be something that’s interesting to data nerds, as it exposes the impact of X-based engagement with charts and graphs, and offers a way to track signal among what can, on X, often be a lot of noise. But it’s unclear whether there’s enough underlying value here for an everyday user, beyond seeing that yes, a @sama tweet can make something go viral.

The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and the top politicians focused on AI issues.

For those who don’t have time to spend on X tracking breaking AI news, Digg could prove a useful resource. But it’s not clear why people would regularly turn to Digg over their preferred news app, RSS reader, or even their X “For You” feed, if they wanted to catch up on what’s trending — especially because there isn’t currently any discussion happening on Digg’s site itself.

Digg may also struggle when it moves on to other topics, as AI news is one of the few areas where discussion still heavily takes place on X. Other verticals don’t have the same traction, especially after Musk’s takeover of the site formerly known as Twitter gave rise to an ecosystem of competitors, which now includes Meta’s creator-focused Threads. Many non-tech-related discussions are now happening off X, or off the public internet entirely.

However, if Digg does end up gaining steam, it could serve as a useful source of website traffic to publishers whose businesses have been decimated by declining clicks thanks to Google’s changing algorithms and the impact of AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries Google displays atop search results, which often answer users’ questions before they ever click through to a website.