Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg’s high-profile but short-lived startup charged users $4.99 a month for slick content meant to appeal to a wide user base. Jia, a veteran of Chinese tech companies, says he saw a market in the U.S. for a cheaper streaming app with a narrower target audience.
Last year, Jia launched ReelShort targeting women, especially stay-at-home moms between the ages of 18 and 45, who he says love romance and fantasy stories. It draws on the success of similar apps in his native China, featuring dramas with episodes that last about a minute, compared with Quibi’s five to 10 minutes.
ReelShort specializes in bingeable, steamy romances, tangled family dramas, handsome billionaires, beautiful women—and vampires and werewolves. The actors are mostly Western, and the dialogue is in English.
The formula is gaining traction with American consumers. The app briefly surpassed ByteDance’s TikTok as the most downloaded entertainment app in Apple’s App Store last month. Of the 16 million global downloads the app has garnered so far, some 4.8 million are in the U.S., making it the company’s biggest market, according to mobile data and analytics provider Data.ai.More than 60% of the firm’s revenue comes from the U.S., according to Jia.
Quibi managed 10.6 million downloads globally before it closed after six months, according to Data.ai.
“You have to find your core audience and build your core content strategy,” Jia said.
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Jia is aiming to follow the viral success in the U.S. of other apps spawned by Chinese tech companies, such as TikTok, e-commerce seller Temu and online fashion company Shein. ReelShort’s downloads remain a fraction of those companies’. Whether its recent buzz will last remains to be seen.
ReelShort was created by Crazy Maple Studio, which Jia founded and which until May was majority-owned by Beijing-based digital-content provider COL. Jia now holds the majority share, with COL holding 49%.
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Jia says the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company operates independently of COL. Crazy Maple Studio also has offices in Shenzhen, China. Each series costs about $300,000 to make, with ReelShort generating more than $22 million in revenue so far, according to Jia.
A typical series has about 60 to 90 episodes, with lightning-fast plot twists and cliffhangers created for viewers accustomed to TikTok videos, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. ReelShort releases a new series about once a week.
COL’s stock, listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, jumped 118% in the month up to Dec. 1, with its market capitalization surging to more than $3 billion, coinciding with ReelShort’s growth in the U.S. COL didn’t respond to requests for comment.
TikTok has come under scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and officials for how it handles the data of American users. All of ReelShort’s user data is stored in the U.S., Jia said, adding that China’s government hasn’t asked for access to it.
‘The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband’
Jia licenses material from the U.S. and China that spans romance and fantasy genres. He says while Quibi offered a range of polished content, ReelShort is targeting viewers with less refined material. It offers many episodes free, with more in a series available if users watch advertisements or make a one-time purchase beginning at $3.99.
One of the most popular titles on offer is “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband,” in which a young woman marries a ne’er-do-well son from a wealthy family to obtain money for her mother’s kidney dialysis. Another is “Fated to My Forbidden Alpha,” in which a woman is caught between two rival werewolf clans. Other series feature vampires, dragons and those who take their human forms.
Series can be shot in about three to five days, and are filmed in Hollywood and Atlanta, a growing destination for TV and movie production because of its lower costs.
It is providing work for some aspiring American actors. Los-Angeles-based Samantha Drews, 24, said that after graduating from college, where she studied cinema and television arts, she got a job last year with ReelShort without auditioning for her part. The pay is competitive with other acting jobs she has had.
In her role as Khloe Adams on “The CEO’s Contract Wife,” she plays a cash-strapped single mother who turns to an escort service to pay for her sister’s medical treatments. There, she is introduced to a rich, handsome executive whose grandfather has forced him to step down from the family business until he can marry and produce an heir.
“It is something completely off the wall,” Drews said. “Every minute, there’s a hook that keeps you watching.”
Jia studied electrical engineering at the University of Utah before working in the U.S. for Chinese telecommunications company ZTE and COL. In 2018 he founded Crazy Maple Studio.
ReelShort has seen usage increase thanks to advertisements it placed on Facebook, along with organic growth through word-of-mouth and chatter on social-media platforms such as Instagram, Jia said. Crazy Maple Studio is profitable, he said, adding that the goal for next year is to nearly quadruple the number of ReelShort’s series from 20 to 75.
Jia said he has been inspired by the way Chinese e-commerce giant PDD, which owns Temu, capitalizes on low-cost items for sale that users often purchase on impulse.
Cliffhangers
One reason for ReelShort’s success might be that consumers are now accustomed to the kind of short, often informal videos that have flourished on TikTok, said Lexi Sydow, head analyst at Data.ai.
“The bite-sized TikTok trend has taken over,” she said.
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ReelShort’s more than one million followers and subscribers across Instagram, YouTube and Facebook often report they are drawn to the shows despite their low production values and sometimes unoriginal plotlines, though some complain about having to pay to watch entire series. Its reviews in Apple’s App Store and in the Google Play app store are mixed.
“Stories are decent, pricing is not—neither is the length of each episode,” wrote one viewer who gave the app three out of five stars in a Google Play review this month.
Toyosi Owolabi, a 22-year-old college student from Baltimore, learned about ReelShort from an advertisement she saw on TikTok last summer. Since then she has finished 10 series, spending an hour or two every day on the app and shelling out about $11 to unlock the episodes.
The series reminded her of the fan-fiction works—stories written by fans that are based on characters and themes from the likes of novels and movies—she used to read as a teenager, she said.
“I was hooked as each episode ends with a cliffhanger to keep users anticipating what will happen next,” she said.
Write to Newley Purnell at [email protected] and Rachel Liang at [email protected]