HOLLYWOOD – Fresh faces of vertical short-form video gathered at the NeueHouse Hollywood on a recent Friday for the latest collaboration in the fast-growing digital media space.
Sarah Moliski, 31, commanded the red carpet in a revealing leather corset set, reminiscent of the characters she plays regularly on ReelShort. The blonde villain, as she refers to herself, is not only an actress for the platform but a casting director. For a company producing 15 to 16 shows a month, Moliski stays busy.
ReelShort is one of the leading vertical short-form platforms that has seen a spectacular rise in users and revenue over the last two years. The Chinese-owned platform has seen a 992% increase in downloads in the last 12 months, from 3.4 million in Q1 2023 to 37 million in early 2024, and told TheWrap they took in a stunning $40 million in September with its micro-payment format.
Its female-heavy audience, half of which is in the United States, has carved out a new space with its soapy romance mini-dramas with one-minute episodes (you read that right), and up to 80 episodes in a “series.”
“People hate on it, but it’s the future of TV,” Moliski told TheWrap.
On this day, a crowd of creatives have gathered in Hollywood to celebrate the latest partnership between Crazy Maple Studio, ReelShort’s parent company, and Screencraft. Crazy Maple Studio Founder and CEO Joey Jia joked to the audience that the only reason he pursued this partnership was to dispel a rumor that ReelShort’s content is AI-generated. “I decided to hold this meeting and prove all the content is invented by human beings, not by AI,” Jia told the crowd.
Screencraft, an organization designed to support burgeoning screenwriters, teamed up with ReelShort to train writers to produce mobile-first episodic series.
“Content consumption is evolving at a rapid pace, and it’s thrilling to collaborate with a digital studio like Crazy Maple that’s ahead of the curve,” said Geoffroy Faugérolas, senior manager of Development for Industry Arts, ScreenCraft’s parent company. “By meeting audiences where they are and harnessing innovative tools, we’re empowering writers and authors with fresh, dynamic ways to connect with engaged viewers and readers.”
“We’re in our own lane. Small screen, big impact.” – Joey Jia, CEO of Crazy Maple Studio
ReelShort has seen explosive growth since its launch in August 2022. The app currently has 50 million monthly active users who make micro-payments by buying “coins” to watch content. By comparison, Tubi, the ad-supported video platform owned by Fox, brought in around $80 million per month in the most recent quarter, only double that of the two-year-old streamer.
ReelShort declined to provide its quarterly revenue, downloads and monthly active users after TheWrap reached out several times.
The company is part of a larger digital storytelling conglomerate called Crazy Maple Studios, based in Silicon Valley and backed by China-based digital publisher COL Group. Crazy Maple Studio is spearheaded by Jia, who went to Harbin Engineering University in China before coming to the States for grad school; he’s now based in the Bay Area.
“We’re in our own lane,” Jia told TheWrap. “Small screen, big impact.”
ReelShort looks like any other streaming platform, organized by category with a variety of titles to scroll through and choose from. A “For You” tab, mimicking TikTok, showcases the minute-long pilots for the app’s hundreds of titles. There’s one thing that separates ReelShort from its better-known competitors, though: its soapy romance originals.
ReelShort dominates this genre, with over 2,000 titles available to its users (75% of whom are women, per ReelShort). These micro-dramas hook users with ridiculous bite-sized plot lines, often following a rags-to-riches story about a handsome billionaire or CEO. For the Chinese-backed company, their content is designed for a Western audience.
Compared to TikTok, with 1 billion monthly active users, ReelShort is still small. But compared to FAST TV, it represents a significant audience. Roku, an ad-supported channel, has more than 80 million monthly users, although it made $824.3 million in platform revenue in Q2 alone.
ReelShort has 750 employees, 150 of whom are based in the United States. Though tech analysts say keeping up with the demand of user-generated video platforms like TikTok will be an uphill battle, CEO Jia told TheWrap ReelShort production is only increasing. The goal for 2025 is a new show every day, he said (almost double the rate the platform is performing right now).
Engagement on ReelShort skyrocketed in November 2023 as two of the platform’s shows went viral, “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” and “Fated to My Forbidden Alpha.” The app shot to the top of the Apple App Store, jumping past TikTok in the process. Since then, Jia has stuck to the plan of matching users’ engagement styles, maximizing retention and traffic on the app.
“I’m intrigued. These numbers are impressive. This is going to continue to grow, and then it probably stalls out at some point. I don’t know what the number is,” Gene Munster, co-founder of Deepwater Asset Management, told TheWrap. “It’s going to be a great outcome for the founders, and they’re going to be loving it, but I don’t think this is going to be the next TikTok.”
Still, there’s a real opportunity for vertical short-form video. In the years since Quibi’s crash, TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have reigned supreme in the space. Users have become accustomed to their rush of dopamine hits from get-ready-with-mes to sports edits to comedy clips, and box office and ratings struggles signal Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s shift to online and vertical viewing.
“The ground has been much better prepared since Quibi crashed and burned in 2020 and there is more demand for professional short video content,” Omdia senior analyst Seth Wallis-Jones told TheWrap. “Lower cost productions supported by advertising or flexible payment options lower the barriers to entry compared to Quibi’s traditional subscription models – which is particularly important for younger users.”
“Accidental Surrogate for Alpha,” “The Return of My Mafia Husband” and “The Virgin and The Billionaire” are just a few of the platform’s most trending titles this week. Each show starts off with a trailer-style pilot to hook viewers into sticking around for all 60-80 one-minute episodes.
The first eight one-minute episodes of any series are free, but after the freebies, users must pay to unlock the rest, a format that leans into a culture already addicted to instant gratification.
A weekly all-access subscription for ReelShort costs $20, a price comparable to a monthly ad-free subscription to Netflix, Hulu or Max. A yearly subscription for the platform is $200.
One of the biggest criticisms of ReelShort may be its greatest strength: the soap opera genre. The video platform has leaned into this highly dramatized style to capture its audience. “I see this market as underserved,” Jia said. “Few people pay attention to female romance.”
But it’s never going to win an Oscar. Jia admitted that users are critical of the platform’s one-note storylines. So much so, that that’s the grounds that some publications used to speculate the app used AI-generated content.
“The article basically said the success, the fast growing of ReelShort is just another example, another success of artificial intelligence, because the writing is so poor and almost guaranteed the story is written by AI, not human beings,” Jia said at the app’s ScreenCraft collaboration event.
ReelShort produces everything in house, from scripts to casting to final cuts. Representatives from ReelShort confirmed to TheWrap that the platform has 100 in-house productions and more than 2,000 licensed titles.
Kate Tucker Fahlsing is the head of just one of those Crazy Maple Studio production houses, Elastic Heart Studio. Fahlsing pivoted to production from her narrative design role on Crazy Maple Studios’ game venture, Chapters.
“It’s giving Hollywood people work,” Fahlsing told TheWrap.
Elastic Heart Studio produces four to eight series a month, a pace that has only increased since she started working with ReelShort. The producer said that, though the projects may not pay as much as big budget feature films, the work is consistent and keeps people coming back. She called the work “lucrative” and a genre with staying power.
Unlike Quibi, ReelShort has capitalized on building their own stars. Quibi’s expensive model relied on existing celebrity talent to bring eyes to the app, while ReelShort has exclusively signed talent of their own. Casting often nonunion actors allows the platform to produce content for cheaper, while building a dedicated fanbase for the fresh talent.
Several of the platform’s fan favorites have been exclusively signed to the site, meaning they cannot work for any other vertical short competitor.
Another ReelShort actress, Haley Lohrli, joined Moliski and others at the NeueHouse event, evening posing for her first Getty Images alongside her co-stars. For someone often depicted as the wife of a billionaire on the platform, she is only 24 — but her fans online don’t mind, referring to her as the “vertical Streep.”
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