How ReelShort CEO Joey Jia Used a Chinese Trend to Disrupt the U.S. Entertainment Industry

The first episode of “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” pans out like a daytime TV melodrama: a female protagonist asks her father and evil stepmother for $50,000 to pay for her mother’s kidney dialysis treatment. Cue an evil stepsister, who snarkily says that the payment is assured—if the lead marries the illegitimate son of a prominent family, who is supposedly a grade-A loser. Unsurprisingly, our hero relents.

All of this happens in just over 90 seconds. But while its brevity seems like a cheap trick, “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband”—a show produced and distributed on the ReelShort app developed by Silicon Valley-based Crazy Maple Studio (one of the TIME100 Most Influential Companies of 2024)—has raked in more than 419 million views. As a point of comparison: the first season of Netflix’s mega-popular Squid Game has 265 million views as of November 4. And Billionaire Husband isn’t Crazy Maple’s only show racking up hundreds of millions of views.

ReelShort owes its massive viewership to the appeal of these “micro-dramas” in the Chinese domestic market. But the nascent success of its shows are just the beginning of a worldwide consumption shift, says Crazy Maple Studio’s CEO Joey Jia, who believes that seconds-long, vertical video dramas will be the future of entertainment.

TIME spoke to Jia earlier this year about how ReelShort reaches audiences, what he’s learned from Disney, and where he sees the business going.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How did ReelShort come about?

Seven years ago, I founded a company called the Crazy Maple Studio. We dedicate our work on the IP monetization platform. So our first product is called Chapters, this visual novel story platform. Since then, we are always looking for new ways to monetize IP or monetize our content. 

Two years ago, in 2022, I noticed there was a big trend in China. Tiktok and Douyin gets more and more popular in China and also globally. People upload their short videos. It's like a different version of YouTube. And I noticed that some of the influencers start to shoot short stories, short dramas, and people really enjoy watching it. In the meantime, the Chinese version of Netflix, iQIYI, for example, keeps investing in the 10-minute long videos, which is really low-cost compared with a multi-hundreds of millions of dollars investment. So they only invest like $5 million or something to start [the] content creation process. I see there is the middle point. So people really enjoy short content, but with a story concept, so that's initially a high field. This is a great opportunity. 

So after doing my research, I decided to leverage Chapters’ IP, and bring this new form of content to the States so as to help grow the business.

Then I bring this idea to Hollywood. And I told those guys, "Crazy Maple has a lot of good stories. Is there any [possibility] we can produce at low cost and deliver that quickly?" But unfortunately, none of the existing distribution channels support it. So people are scared about, "Oh, your investment is that small, so there's no way we're going to distribute." So that's why I decided to build our own distribution app called ReelShort, to focus on those types of content.

When I look at the selection of dramas that are available on ReelShort, they tend to fall into certain genres like werewolves, revenge plots, brides, billionaires. They all sort of follow this formula, but what's the scientific basis for that formula? Was it intentional?

If you only look at the genres, people say, “Oh, this is a werewolf and the billionaire story.” Frankly speaking, there's millions of different types of the werewolf and the billionaire story in the market. So the real question is how ReelShort can make this special story unique, and why people pay the money, and why it becomes so financially successful on this model. 

We're creating a very different type of format of stories. We see so many good stories, but there's zero ability to attract traffic, nobody is interested. So we have to build a story with a very strong capability to attract traffic, people. More precisely once we put this clip on Facebook, people watch it. In no time they download, decide to make a paid purchase. So that is called “impulse purchases content.” We call them new media stories.

You said that there's a relatively low cost to producing a show on ReelShort. How do you make sure that the costs are low? And how much on average does a show cost?

The short answer is our production cost is below $300,000. There is a reason why people shoot more expensive stories. There is a buffer. If you really look at the production cost, it’s a lot.

Our production cost is similar, even identical to the other film productions. However, in film production, they have to pay a premium, or extra to hire a celebrity. They rely on celebrities to bring more traffic. Most of their budget goes to celebrities. But we don't hire celebrities. We spend almost every single penny on our story. We're using the story to drive traffic. They're using celebrities to drive traffic.

Who writes the content on ReelShort? There are reports that say some of the content sounds like they've been written by AI.

If AI could write content and make money right away, I would do everything with AI. Oh, no. It’s our in-house editors. We have an in-house editor, an in-house screenwriting team, they’re managing the entire content creation process. And some people say, “Oh, your content is really kind of [like] AI.” I disagree. We built our own content base, our own method. We have to make sure everybody understands it. Even the people that may not have taken higher education, but they can understand content right away. So for us the benchmark is how easy your story can be understood by other people.

There have been talks of micro-dramas being the future of streaming. We're seeing short-form video actually taking over. TV was considered legacy media, and now Netflix could become legacy media because of apps like ReelShort. Is your app and many others like it the future of entertainment?

I believe it 100%. I believe vertical video content will become a primary entertainment content absorption channel and it will have a major content distribution platform focused on vertical. I [hope] that content distributor platform will be ReelShort. And here's the reason why: for the traditional legacy [media], their content creation process is too long. And they don't have enough data to support how to optimize and evolve content because they invest too much up front. There's no linked content audience data to give you feedback to tell you how to improve your content. 

Our content creation process, we try to control within three months. So from day zero, when people start on the ideas [until] the last day, [when] we put it online, is three months. After three months, we have full data… how many [people] pay for this content, and why do you pay for that content, and what's the retention data. And we know exactly where people drop [off]. So that gives us the chance to fix it if we wanted. [If] we have a story that failed and we don't understand what was going on, and after three months, we figure it out, guess what, we reinvest money and rebuild the same story with different characters and it becomes a hit story. So that content production pipeline and the flexibility gives us a huge advantage when we're evolving stories.

Is there space for other sorts of stories that would then not fall in the genres that people watch, or is it purely a views-based metric that ReelShort is banking on?

That's why I believe in the vertical content industry. This right now is just the beginning. So we're focusing on the female cohort. We offer romantic stories, we offer high-drama stories. Later on, we will build mystery, thriller, action, even more types of content for different cohorts of users. The best part of this is frequency. High frequency usage of content. They don't have to have one hour [to] go back home to sit on the sofa to watch Netflix. Anytime they can pick up a cell phone if they only have five minutes, they can enjoy their content, and they can stop at any time. So we try to expand our genres, like a thriller, using approved story structures. I believe we will see different types of genres show up in the next few months.

How do you make sure that audiences don't get tired of the stories?

That’s a very good question. There are limited story structures in this world. Disney is using the most popular story structures, always bringing new elements. So our job is to stick with approved methods, and always bring a fresh, eye-opening moment and a fresh concept. And to make sure there is a value for our users. Nobody [wants] to constantly repeat watching the same types of tropes. Nobody. The market would abandon us if we only followed one model. We have to keep evolving. And always bringing new concepts, an eye opening moment, magical moment, so people can look [at] fresh [content and] always have their interest. That's the challenge for the content creators every single day. Every day we have a brainstorming room, and talk about a new concept, new ideas. I will kill most of the ideas and that’s how we keep bringing a new concept to the platform.

ReelShort made news for surpassing TikTok at one point when it came to downloads. How did you feel about that?

Nervous.

Why? 

Well, it's unexpected. We're a very small team. Nobody expected we’d achieve [those] huge downloads in no time. We're not ready yet. It took our team a lot of effort to build the infrastructure to meet these higher requirements from the audience. I feel we're almost there, but we're not ready yet. We're still growing. 

Where do you see ReelShort in a year, or two, or even five?

I [hope] ReelShort can become a real platform that can host more and more PUGC (professional user-generated content)—content creators’ stories. And Netflix is a great platform. I call it “super PUGC.” They only work with the best of the best content creators. TikTok, they only work with influencers, “UGC.” There are tons of the 90% of content creators, the professionals, but there's really no distribution channel. They have a great concept, but there's no distribution channel for them. So ReelShort, the goal is to build a distribution channel. We can offer exposure for those people. For those PUGC content creators, as long as you have a story, this can be a platform for you. Low-cost, and we will make sure we can put your content right in front of an audience. So in [the] next five years, ReelShort will hopefully become a real true distribution platform [that] can host more and more professional content creators’ work, can find a great fanbase for them, and can pay back and earn them money, and continue to build more stories for the industry.

I'm asking that because when we look at disruptive companies, it's not like short-form video and short-form dramas are new. We have Quibi which basically shut down in less than a year. How do you make sure that ReelShort stays at the top of its game and continues to deliver?

It's a very complicated question. Number one, we have to make sure all content always has the right audience. The market is fast-changing, and the audience is fast-changing. And we have to always keep sharp and make sure we understand the market changes, to respond to changes. It’s not easy. Number two is content strategy. And we will put more resources into building the most stable platform to catch up. But at the end of the day, this is a story platform. It’s a fiction platform. We want to deliver the best of fantasy that's a story for our audience and invest at a fast pace, in a very highly efficient way.