Screenburn Group has launched a digital marketplace for finished microdrama scripts as it kicks off its seed financing round.
The company says the new platform aims to solve the industry’s retention problem. It has a “Retention Engine” that rates every script. Each is structured for an 80-episode season, with hooks in every five episodes. On average, a paywall is placed after episode ten. The scripts are written in-house and span a range of genres.
Buyers receive the series script, support materials, and a branding pack with the Screenburn Certified mark. The mark is only placed on scripts that reached a score of at least 80 on its retention ranking.
Screenburn Group opens its seed round today, with funding to be used for writers and its script-to-screen production pipeline.
Dr Charles Kriel, co-founder and CEO of Screenburn Group, said, “The industry has plenty of scripts and series, and very few that people finish. Every platform buys its audience. After that, the story either holds them or it doesn’t, and by then the marketing money is spent. We built the engine that measures whether a story holds while it is still on the page. Every script in our shop has to pass that test. Read episode one, read the score, and you know what you’re buying before you spend a dollar on production.”
Kat Viken, co-founder of Screenburn Group, added, “Microdrama is the fastest-growing screen format in the world, and the companies making it spend more on finding viewers than on the shows themselves. Whether you produce with AI or not, you need a story that holds the audience. Screenburn measures whether a story will hold before anyone spends money making it. That belongs at the start of the process, so that’s where our focus has been when we built the company.”
Damian Collins, former Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy and Chair of the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, serves as chairman of Screenburn Group.
