ReelShort and the rise of dramaslop

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Of the top grossing 15 app store non-game apps launched in 2023-24:

• 1 was a Pokemon-themed sleep tracker

• 4 were ChatGPT wrappers

• And 8 were ReelShort clones (which I collectively call “dramaslop”)

Wait what?

What is ReelShort?

Well, for a start, it’s currently the #1 most downloaded non-game app on the US app store right now (ChatGPT is #3, TikTok is #5). Which is odd, for an app that I’ve heard almost nobody talk about using.

In brief, ReelShort is a Chinese consumer app that makes US-focused, freemium vertical video stories based on bottom-of-the-barrel “minimum viable” storylines, acting, set design and everything else. It’s run-rating over $300m in net revenue, a remarkable feat for a company founded only two years ago, which almost nobody is talking about.

But there’s a lot more to it than that.

This article is going to explain the story of ReelShort, why it and its equivalents (which I collectively dub “dramaslop”) are the Next Big Thing, and why everyone from TikTok, to Meta, to mobile gaming studios, need to watch out.

So without further ado…

ReelShort: solid gold shit, maestro

In the first scene of Love Actually, Bill Nighy’s aged popstar is in the recording studio, creating a cheesy Christmas-themed rehashing of his once-popular song “Love Is All Around”, with the new lyrics “Christmas Is All Around”. At one point he asks his producer with disappointment: “This is shit, isn’t it?”

The producer replies with a beaming face: “Yup! Solid gold shit, maestro.”

ReelShort is the Solid Gold Shit of our time.

Let’s start by describing the ReelShort product. These three screens are what greets you when you open the app and watch your first short (in my case: “Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband”).

After watching a few of these, I noticed a pattern in several of the storylines:

1. An exploited, downtrodden, long-suffering lead female character

2. In an abusive or unfaithful relationship

3. Rescued from it by a male “billionaire” (often in disguise)

4. Instantly falls in love

5. The rest of the episode is spent gradually humiliating and punishing the characters who didn’t value the female lead in the beginning

Cutting across the cookie-cutter, predictable narratives, there is consistently low-budget set designs, poor acting, cheap costumes, and almost comically basic dialogue, which is basically just a journey from one predictable cliffhanger to another.

Although it would be tempting to suggest that the dialogue and storylines are written by AI, I very much doubt it. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not easy for a AI to write retentive, low-brow content.

In other words, ReelShort’s variety of slop is unmistakably human.

Some have compared ReelShort to Quibi, as they are both vertical, shortform, storyline-based consumer apps.

But in reality, they are polar opposites.

Quibi was about high production value content, with proven stars, expensive sets, and low-volume. ReelShort is about cheap-to-film content, with amateur actors, cheap sets, and high volume, and a seemingly unending pool of similar stories to test against audiences.

Basically, ReelShort is the final boss of the age of slop.

Monetizing ReelShort

ReelShort uses a monetization strategy I call “aggressive freemium”.

Put simply, this involves no monetization whatsoever, until around 10 minutes into the user’s first story. At this point (invariably at a cliffhanger), the user is faced with the following screen:

This allows you to either pay $20+ weekly (annualized: $1,000…) to unlock all episodes, or watch an ad to unlock the next two minute segment for free. If you watch the ad, it is an Applovin-style unskippable, playable mobile game ad, and requires at least 30 second watch time. Two minutes later, you will be faced by the same paywall. A maximum of five ad-skips are allowed.

The final piece are ReelShort’s “coins”. Coins can be earned by turning on notifications, sharing email, and watching additional ads, as well as daily streaks. Predictably, coins unlock additional episodes.

ReelShort also hijacks your phone’s lock screen, with an impenetrable but difficult-to-remove, permanent Live Activities window. Effectively, ReelShort has persuaded iOS that it is a streaming product, and has injected itself onto the Home Screen.

I call this “aggressive freemium” because, although some content is available for free, it is made so unpleasant to use the free version, and the paywalls are so expensive, that paying has almost become a requirement.

This aggressive monetization model is crucial to the success of the business: it has allowed them to invest heavily in paid marketing, particularly on TikTok. Its ads are generally just free episodes of popular ReelShort episodes, which end on cliffhangers and require users to download the app to watch the rest.

This has translated into dramatic financial gains for the company: ReelShort itself is run-rating over $300m in revenue, and COL Group, its part-owner, is trading on the Guangzhou stock exchange at a market cap of around $2 billion. Given this investment in paid acquisition and content development, COL Group remains unprofitable, and is an under-the-radar company both in China and the US.

The story of ReelShort

Reelshort was founded in 2022 by Joey Jia, via his production company Crazy Maple Studio (co-owned by a Chinese media company COL Group), headquartered in Sunnyvale California.

You might recognize Crazy Maple Studio as the creators of Chapters, an interactive stories app founded in 2017, which builds choose-your-own-adventure storylines for mass-market users.

Joey Jia and the Chapters team saw the rise of shortform video soap apps in China, and realized there was a gap in the market for a US equivalent, and launched ReelShort. Using COL Group’s balance sheet and his existing Chapters storylines, he started investing heavily into new shortform content, building up supply which he could test against initial audiences.

It very quickly became clear that there was appetite for this, and after introducing aggressive monetization and scaling paid marketing, they started to see serious traction. According to an interview with Forbes, Joey Jia’s vision is to build ReelShort into a PUGC (professional user-generated content) platform, led by their own content, but also containing high-quality stories from creators around the world.

And that makes sense, because the category is getting competitive.

The future for ReelShort: Fighting dramaslop competitors

Like any successful app store app, ReelShort has had no shortage of clones. DramaBox, ShortMax, GoodShort, and various others have all launched the last two years, with many more in the tiers below.

Together, I call them dramaslop.

And together, they are climbing the app store. See last week:

It is particularly easy to launch a ReelShort competitor because the storylines, and scripts can all be copied from Chinese equivalents, and even each other. In the days when launching a TV show cost millions of dollars, it was not possible to simply directly copy another, because the production cost was too great to replicate it. In a ReelShort world where a full show costs a few hundred thousand dollars all-in, this is becoming a real possibility.

So by undercutting the media market, ReelShort has made warding off its own copycats its next big challenge. After all, people watch ReelShort for a quick fix of drama, not for a well-crafted storylines and expensive special effects.

But whatever happens to ReelShort, this battle between it and its clones will be a symbol of the next era of the internet: will the entry brand will win, or will the market have its leader commoditized away?

In that sense, ReelShorts and dramaslop are just a microcosm of a much larger battle: of innovators against copycats (sloppycats?) in the Age of Slop.

This broader topic will be the subject of my next post. I’m hoping that one won’t require me to watch fifteen minutes of The Accidental Billionaire’s Bride.