Why short drama is beating games at Engagement & UA (Holywater's Bogdan Nesvit Explains)

5,700 in comparison to
just ones we see.
Yeah, just the ones you see, which is in comparison to the gaming industry already very solid number. And if it's more, then it's even better because
it's 15,000 per month. 15,000 per month.
Nice.
That's more than Vita Mayong, right? No. No. Vayong is 23,000 blog. [snorts] Blog. Okay. So, so
the question is like why 15,000? It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice. [music] My day drops knowledge made of golden eyes. Felix with ads making those coins rise. Jack up designs worlds chasing the sky. We're [music] the two and a half game the midnight crew talking UA advers and game design too. Mate feeling shak bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early day master eyes [music] on the prize. Tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Felix stacks colors like a wizard in disguise. Jack crafter realms lift us to the high. [music] Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey sick. Got your back. Ads are beautiful. [music] They light the way. Click it

fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. [music] Uh-huh. Uh-huh. [music] Do we can do magic afterwards. Hello everybody. Welcome to another super special rare episode or how do we want to call it? because this is again a live review. We haven't been on the podcast for a while. So my name is Matan Charich.
I'm Felix Brock.
And I'm Yak.
We are your hosts and we have a very special guest Bogdan from Holy Water. Welcome to the podcast. Can you introduce yourself and your company?
Hi guys, I'm Bogdan Nestit. I'm co-founder and coe of the company called Holy Water. We are an entertainment uh network. We call ourselves as AI first entertainment network. Uh we have three

main products. We have a books platform called my passion. We have a video streaming platform which is called my drama. And we have AI video streaming platform called my views. We have 70 million70 uh million users across all of our platforms. Right now our books platform is uh top two independent books publishing platform in the world by revenue. Our video streaming platform is top one vertical video streaming platform outside of China right now. Happy to be here.
Thanks.
Hell of an intro.
Yeah,
it's Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that's hell of an intro because uh when we started talking about having you on the podcast, I was like, ah, you know, because we are talking about um short dramas quite for some time and for quite a lot. We had a real short episode, we have drama popes episode. I was like, "Ah, you know, I saw also your amazing announcement about just, you know, [ __ ] short drama. Let's just do entertainment. Let's just go." I was like, "Okay, great." And then I'm sorry, but we didn't we didn't catch each other

on the live actually recording in LA because I was in Santa Barbara was in LA, but kids happen and usually it's not that easy to show. But anyway, thank you very much. I mean when you talked about the my books I think like Yakob just lost his mind completely because oh my god
they're in headlights.
Yeah it's like whoa. Can you talk about like how you actually started? I think it was the book uh branch that you started with and then kind of started doing all afterwards or how how did it
yeah to be actually a funny a funny thing we started from interactive stories. It was choose your own adventure game. Uh that was our first content product that we launched. At one point we were top one in the world by installs in interactive stories. Then I realized that in order to create great interactive stories, you need to find stories to basically base those interactive stories on. So we realized that okay there are a lot of amateur writers around the world and they don't

have any great platforms to publish their work, publish, monetize and distribute basically. So we launched books platform. We started working with amateur writers. We started sourcing books. Then we started turning those books into interactive stories. And this is the approach that worked really well for us. And this is where we started forming this vision of creating an basically ecosystem of content products where we discovered great IPs as books and then turned those books in different content forms like interactive stories, comic books, vertical video streaming, audio books. We are we are now doing anime and other forms. This is essentially this is essentially how we started and how we got into the point where we are right now.
It's by anime you mean manga and manga?
Anime mostly. Yeah. But it will be AI generated anime actually.
Okay. Yeah,
that's quite interesting.
more more mainstream more like think of a reference something that they normally publish on Netflix right now and uh something that you can go and find on Crunchyroll as well. So okay what we what what we see is that basically in

entertainment and content in general there are like two main trends right now that we see the first one is it's short form vertical content people attention span is dropping and the second trend is AI enabled content basically you can produce content much faster and more efficient with AI so that these are basically things that we are focused on right now
that's quite interesting yeah I seen a lot of generated anime recently
okay but we didn't know about the game first because then what you're you're talking about feels like so we you were the first and then everybody else copied basically what what work what
was the year yeah what was the year if you can tell
it was 2020 when we launched the game 2020
2020
okay
to put we need to put all the context into all the timelines because then we have episodes we have choices and all of these and then that's where actually
all these games and even what was the the Maple Story game?

Chapters.
Chapters.
Chapters. Yeah,
I I can go for the screen share in a second.
The episodes choices were like first somewhere, then chapters, then ourselves. So, we were not the first ones for sure.
Wiping the floor with everybody.
Love and Deep Space. Even we actually got an interesting comment under the Love and Deep Space video that we should do a new new episode about Love and Deep Space because they have new content coming in December. And then enjoy. and they have a lot of content.
Yeah, they're doing 35 million a month and they're, as I said, wiping the floor. Chapters is the second biggest one currently. But I think like this is kind of a remnant of a shell of a category now because all of these like episode choices and all these other things like I think they're kind of like previous generation games basically. Love and Deep Space is the only one that's kind of the next generation one. There's like so much more different loops and different kind of designs and vectors that they went after. These guys literally they have podcasts that you can listen to. I mean the characters and stuff. So this is like another level. And then again we have companies that

have moved to short drama which is Crazy Maple Story with the second game here which is the
where we are the the chart that we'll be talking about today.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That's
the main chart. But again this is I think very important piece of the puzzle because it's same as the market leader here which is originally a gaming company not a short drama series whatever out of nowhere they have like giant gaming portfolio chapters being just one of the games and they also crossplatform I mean cross transfer the traffic from the real short app into the chapters game. Wait, I just want to get Bogdan's take here like when you see this chart on current distribution of the revenue in this genre. Just talk us through we see you coming here quite strongly and relatively quickly as well. Just talk us through this.
Yeah, so essentially uh this chart doesn't reflect the whole picture because it doesn't it doesn't grasp the majority of our revenue which is uh outside of App Store and Google Play as well. So if you if you look if if you if

you look at the real charts right now so we are around top five there are super strong leaders in the niche which are far away from everyone else it's real short drama box it's good short and I think it's I have a draw away from that short it's one of them so those guys are pretty insane what distinguishes them from everyone else first of all is the amount of content basically if you take real short they release around 300 to 400 series per year just imagine Just just think about this.
One a day.
In one a day.
It's one a day. They essentially have unlimited user acquisition budget and they can allow themselves like really far paybacks like day 365 payback which is something that companies like us don't normally do as well. So that's the main thing that distinguishes them. And I think like the uh the main thing uh for other players to do to basically if if they target the leadership position is first of all to figure out how they can match real short drama box in terms of number of series that they're

releasing. So that was the main thing that we actually were solving this year and I think we solved it. So next year we're going to release almost the same amount of of series that real short and draw box are releasing. So those guys are great. They are learning a lot from them. But I think if we just learn and basically just learn from them, we are going to be the guys who are constantly catching up because they're going to be one step ahead all the time. So this is basically this notion. This is what God is thinking. Okay, what can we do in order not to catch up but basically skip a couple of steps forward. This is what led us to signing Fox agreement basically and going to Hollywood and trying to you know sign all those big studios their IP and try to make this niche and to into mainstream. This is our goal right now.
Okay, let's process this. So, first of all, lot of stuff. First of all, first of all,
where is your like majority of revenue happening is on web or
if you can tell.
Yeah, if you can tell.
Yes. There there are not too many options. So, there are stores and then

there are there is web and there is ads. So, ads and web.
Yes,
is where majority of our revenue is.
Awesome. Okay. Just before you ask your next one, just real short, how much money do you estimate they earn outside of the app stores as a percentage?
I our estimate is around 15%. They don't make a lot on web. Uh and the ads revenue is still small for the space. I I think for them it might be around 10%.
Yeah. Uh 12 I calculated but yes, something like that.
Why do why do you think that?
My bad. My bad. Yes. No worries.
Is not working for them really like if it's so small. I guess because it's the
I think I think it's not obvious. It's like it's like gaming, right? Everyone in gaming used to used to do used to do user acquisition directly to app and I don't I don't see a lot of a lot of companies challenging this assumption and basically starting to think okay what if we start doing user acquisition to web like getting subscriptions and app purchases to web or maybe just using

web as a funnel to drive users to app that is something you know like you have to challenge status quo in order to start thinking like this and not a lot of people actually challenge status quo especially when they're already big players uh We as the company we started web long time ago because the first company that I launched with my co-founder it was apps business. We launched bunch bunch of apps. We did also web funnels for those apps. They worked really well. So we started we started from the assumption okay what if we start web and app at the same time and see what works the best and basically see if we can get incremental audience on top with web to app. And this is what got us got us into uh into thinking about web. Did anyone say web revenue? Oh yeah. This episode is brought to you by Fastpring, the no drama D2C partner that's been scaling with mobile publishers for over 20 years. They're fast growing, profitable, and seriously reliable, which is more than you can say about most vendors in

this space. Anyway, whether you're launching a new web store, replacing your current D system, or adding a backup plan, Fast Spring is here for you. Visit fastspring.gg to set up your web store today. Fastpring.gg. Hello, Fastpring. Thank you very much, guys, for sponsoring this episode. I'm so glad we're recording this podcast after the predictions that we did on Monday because this me Yeah, I'm going to just do victory live afterwards. No, but jokes aside, I think uh yak to your point like they're already earning 4 40 mil.
They're already big. They don't really need to be as scrappy and just, you know, like earn they don't think about it in this way because they don't need to because they have unlimited money. If you don't and if you're small and you you need to win somewhere, then these are like the different loopholes you you're trying to find. That's my

assumption at least.
Yeah. At the same at the same time, it's it's not as as simple as it sounds because stores are really good at giving you infrastructure for payments. And once you start doing web payments, you have to build infrastructure as well. You have to think about a lot of different things that you are not normally thinking about when you are just monetizing via app. So it's it's it's like launching a new company, a new project basically. So it's challenging as well. So I'm not sure that all the companies need to think about web but this is something that can be an incremental revenue as well as ads revenue as well. Ads I think ads revenue is going to be huge for especially vertical media series niche because in order to go mainstream you have to expand your audience essentially and how do you expand your audience? You either lower the prices or you go with asetization or you go into new genres. So I think like those things we'll see in the next year.
All right, Bogdan. So one of the things when we reviewed real short
I want to come back to like what Bogdan

said. Wait a minute. Because revenue afterwards after millions of things like a million of things because then you said you solved basically the content pipeline with IPs and folks and all the all the stuff like
unpack this please. And where is the AI element in this because I'm definitely waiting for an AI element in in this one alongside the IP as well.
Sure AI element is huge here. Let's start first from quantity of content like this is what we were solving. So basically the notion that I'm proceeding from first thing that that we did we we analyzed revenue per series released like average revenue per series released us versus all the competitors on the market and we found out that our revenue per series is the highest. This is what we know. Then our next assumption was okay what if we increase the number of series released to the level of our competitors. This mean this means that we we going to be able to catch up with

them in terms of the revenue. So the the logic were simple but in order to catch up with them in terms of the number of series we we need to produce like 200 to 400 series. Each series costs around 150k from 150 to 200. You can do the math. Basically it's an investment of yeah
it's an investment of 40 million this is something something that we cannot afford at this point we couldn't afford at at that point so I started thinking okay where can I get that content my assumption was okay there are studios in Hollywood like Fox Warner Brothers NBCU and others those studios are hungry for a couple of things they're hungry for audience where they actually spend time and audience spends time on socials on social media and this is where those studios are not present They're hungry for data. So they want users insights. They want to see how users interact with the content. And they're also hungry hungry to decrease the costs of uh you know basically increase the chances that they produce a

hit. One of the biggest crisis in Hollywood right now is that the movies that they produce the economics doesn't work right now. So
that's why we have rerun of every single IP on the on earth basically all the time.
Ex. Exactly. Yeah. Basically what I thought is that vertical video series could be a perfect IP incubation for Hollywood. Perfect IP incubation for Hollywood. So this is what got me into Hollywood. Like the first thing that we did after we launched my drama, we went to Hollywood and started talking to all the studios. Uh we found out that uh Fox were the most innovative studio like they were the fastest. So we signed the deal with them for 200 series that they're producing for us. We are sharing data and insights with them. they're producing using their capacities, using their talent, IPs and and and and everything else. The bigger picture here is that together with Fox, we basically created this trusted platform on the market right now for other studios to come in and start producing with us, giving us their IPs, produce with us, learn with us, and basically we are

going to be sharing data with them. So this is what basically if you if you take this year the main thing that we did was switching from studio model where we produce most of our content to platform model where we just work work on our platform improve retention recommendation system data insights but we have studios producing for us. So that's how we how we solve the amount of content in terms of AI. I I can pose here. We can talk about this. I can go straight into Are you are you becoming like a like a small Netflix at this point with all the data and and everything that the insights for for the users?
That that that's the point because the opportunity that we see is essentially to build a mobile first Netflix. We don't see that any video streaming platforms are focused on mobile too much and you know like turning your screen turning your screen around to stream a movie. It's not focusing on mobile. Yeah. So we we see this opportunity right now and we they they're building it step by step.
Yeah, we'll be talking about this all

the time that Netflix basically screw up their whole gaming strategy whatever should be thrown out of the window. They should be doing this already like 5 years ago and they talk they're still like even in this whole acquisition like yeah whatever.
Do so do the studios pay you to produce? Yeah, that's my question here because now it sounds
they produce they produce for us. We they they produce for us and we share we share profits with them.
Yeah, that's okay.
Because now it sounds a little bit like Roblox to me instead of Netflix to be honest where you kind of provide the space and they occupy the space and you share the spoils. Yeah. Do I get that right?
We're going to get to Roblox a bit in the future when we start talking about AI because you are spot on about about Roblox.
Nice. That's the best platform currently on on the market. Yeah. I mean like user generated content which like this is not user generated. Let's go studio generated. But
we'll get to user generated as well. You are spot on actually. Yeah.
Can you tell a little bit like what's

the difference between for instance like real short regarding the this platform model like is there a difference even like do I get that right?
The different
real short being the market leader just just saying we have the review on the bot so if you want to see it.
Yeah. I I think I think it's more like comparing um maybe two streaming platforms like I I don't know like comparing for example Disney Disney uh streaming platform with HBO. So basically the the there is there is not a lot that you can do in for your platform to diff differentiate uh apart from uh building recommendation system.
Yeah it's about it's about content. You're right it's about it's about content. So uh in terms of our strategy right now what what we are doing uh and what we see our competitors doing a bit less than ourselves right now we experimenting with variety of genres that that's the first thing so we believe that not just drama it's it's funny that I'm saying this because our product is called my drama [laughter] it was one of my biggest mistakes to

call the product my drama because we are going to have to re rename them and renaming is always painful. So right right now we are expanding generics because we believe that any genre can work uh within this space. It's just a new form of entertainment. That's the first thing. Another thing we are we are going hard on AI. We have a different platform which you're not reviewing right now. It's called my news. My news is the platform with 100% AI generated shows.
You can maybe download it. You can maybe also show it here. So on my news we are we are basically it's 100% AI generated shows. We created an internal tool. It's like an front end wrapper around Sora, VO3, Cling and other models. And we created a workflow to generate films basically. And we are generating films for our main news platform. And uh the best AI generated movies we then go and and turn into live action movie for my movies for my drama.
And is it a separate separate account as the holy water one?
Yes, it's is the separate account.

Was the name of the account if you can tell? My my muse. My and Muse is new as Muse.
Oh, my Muse.
My Muse.
Okay.
And this this platform is the fastest growing product of of ourselves. We are essentially disrupting ourselves. We we are disrupting our own model because we we believe that most of the vertical video shows in the future will be AI generating like the quality is already insane. And getting back to your point Yak coup about Roblox. So the internal tool that we are building for AI generating movies is already quite superior. It's it's already quite great like I I can go and generate movies there and at some point it's going to be ready to for us to make it public to make it public to anyone so that anyone can go to the product and generate their own movie.
So so it's like a similar deal that Disney just did with the Sora guys. They licensed their 200 characters for Chipia and said like okay you can use the user generated content on Disney Plus later.
Yeah. If we if we think we can

right right and it's it's already a tool where you can go you can generate movies but the tool is not the main thing there are a lot of tools on the market the main thing is distribution platform if you generate a great series as a user you can distribute that video series and all my music platform and you're going to be getting revenues to share from from my views so essentially that's the grand vision that we are building towards right now
and that's the road blocks that that
because I'm like following few few AI video channels that are just like again like few five minutes, six minutes kind of movies and mostly because of like the technical specificities like how to guys do that and like show off tutorials of stuff like that. But I still don't think like we have like a very kind of coherent kind of content made by AI yet. It's mostly like these kind of like random things like nice showoffs but not not yet like you know something.
Let's let's watch one of the shows. It already looks amazing. Actually the shows they perform some of them they

perform the same as my drama shows in terms of redemption, in terms of a lot of other things. I think a lot of people right now actually underestimate how powerful AI can be if you build great workflow. If you combine it with uh creativity as well, great creative workflow.
What's the account called? It's my muse. But what's do I get the
Okay.
Yeah. Okay. It's
This is This is always the the biggest issue. People have 7,000 different accounts and you have no idea like where to because I was
speaking with or dealing with.
Yeah. No. Yeah. [laughter] Kind of. No. No. This is great. Yeah.
This one. Yeah.
But this is bigger on web than on mobile, right? or
uh Yeah. Yeah, you're right.
Yeah. Okay, cool.
Yeah, because we couldn't tell
find it on tower.
No, no, no. We can't we can't find it by this. Ah, this it this is your
very small
amazing funnel. There you go. This is all you need.
Please let story werewolf. Yes.

We love werewolf. Yes.
No. Yes.
Oh, Billy. Of course. I know. There we go. That is amazing. How long did it take? How long did it take for you to build this My Muse kind of app?
Yeah. Super quick.
A a couple of weeks.
Yeah.
And it even runs on the emulator, not like the other one. That's great. [laughter]
Wow.
Yeah.
We should be covering this more often.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is so this is the [clears throat] this is the
by the way just the question like maybe again if you can't tell if you don't know do you use open source AI stuff?
Oh but when you say open source what what do you mean
like uh open source models that are generated locally on on your GPU not just like third party tools to make
yeah yeah we we are we we use open source models. Yeah.
There's my victory lab prediction. I think I can already see like some of the things here. I'm just spending too much stuff on CVA AI if if you know the site

like the open source community for AI and there's like there's so much stuff that these guys are kind of pushing out and it's all communitydriven. So in my opinion, open source models will be superior to the normal video generation models eventually because they will just be so much more additions to them that they will just work better. And of course they're so
I mean if you know like we we have this AI creative trends episode where Felix have no has no idea like what is AI and what is not
and Felix I'm pretty sure you wouldn't even say this is AI, right?
Oh yeah, this is AI.
Oh you can see like her her face AI. We can
but probably in a year I won't notice right like so yeah
spdan do you get these
it doesn't it doesn't matter guys if you can see what
again we are the the ones that deal with every day
if my mom can see I I have the thing called mom test mom test I show shows to my mom and and ask her whether whether she knows it's or not she she can't she can't tell
I I was trying to I was trying to get

there because we know and of course like from the gaming industry and app industry like notice but normal human being can't tell
her for instance she looks much better I guess a different model or something
can't can't tell really
I notice here in the AI generated right the hook comes a bit later and there's no chapters what what's the thinking here
the thinking basically we run um a couple of AB tests where we have like a seamless flow where you you basically don't switch episodes so that it's visible to users versus the flow where you can you actually have to tap on the episodes to switch them. This flow works better for us. So decided to roll it out.
Okay. And do I get it right that currently the app is on mobile in kind of a soft launch state for somehow
the platform is already um a couple of million error in terms of revenue. So it's it's growing fast. It's it's past soft launch. It's past launch. Yeah.

Okay. But mainly on web.
Yeah. Yeah. Because like I'm just just to kind of briefly show this. I'm just like looking a little bit on the you know I know it's just like
welcome to the real world where actually people just like keeping with the people watching this who will then go on sensor tower and say like what are you talking about and like yeah we need to say this
right
but that's right
if people going to say this after bogdan mentioned they're making way more money on web and seeing this then and even after that if they say it's dead then leave just this podcast anyway.
Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. Just like making sure that we close in the like loose ends here that like it's the right one.
Just to make sure guys, I didn't say we making more money on web. I said it's either web or it's either web or ad. So it's between and web.
Fair enough. Fair enough.
Maybe
just the whole picture.
Yeah. Let's see.
Menu. So people don't really bombard you

with with feedback like, "Oh my god, this is AI.
You are ruining people's lives and stealing jobs because you're using AI." Okay.
We we we actually we actually ask people uh to provide feedback after each video series to to see uh whether they they liked it or not.
Like 95% of feedback say like four plus stars and people are loving it.
Nice. People mostly love stories. I don't see right now that people care too much whether it's AI or not. People love stories.
And do I get that right that because it's AI you can afford a lot of these like fantasy like movies which would not be possible basically on like a real Hollywood production because again
that that's the point. So the opportunity here is that you you can produce something that is going to be expensive and
Yeah. It looks like Game of Thrones.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Uh I don't know. Yeah. probably a coincidence.
Of course. Of course. Nice. Like this is

this such great like such a great evolution if you think about it from books to to short dramas and to like basically AI generated stories.
Yeah. I think like this is this is one of the problems I always had with this category that you know you can only produce like all within this kind of a template of this like low cost drama. It's all like office space and like house or whatever and all these like environments that like normal actors can kind of let you do because that's like the you know that's the barrier of reality that we're facing otherwise giant production budget CGI da da da da the cost skyrockets but with AI this problem is solved and like immediately. Yeah. I mean, yeah, but
you just you just had to wait until the AI looks like this and not like
spaghetti Will Smith from 2022, right? So, I mean, that's the difference,
you know, but like it takes like two or one or two years and then we're there. Like it's it's not that hard. And it's also like again, I think this will also be like a skill issue. There will be a

lot of people being able to generate AI shows and there will be very few people able to only generate cutting edge AI shows because again it's like AI is also it has its own skill ceiling. Not everybody will be the master of it.
Exactly. There is there is so much skill process and testing goes into this so that so that it's clear to everyone who is watching. It's not something that we generate by pressing a couple of buttons like prompt or whatever. there are like re real creative producers and directors involved. They're just doing it much faster with the tools that we have internally right now. So essentially what we believe in is that we going to be we approaching this infinite content era in the future like their content will be so much so abundant and everyone is going to be a creator. Basically you can create a movie from your room instead of just going to Hollywood and investing tens of millions of dollars. And what will matter is essentially like two things that we think. The first one is IP whether you you you already have great IPs or you're able to generate great IPs on scale

or and distribution. So those two things uh that's something that we are focused on right now.
Wow, it's impressive.
I think we finally leveled up the category because we we stopped looking at it and finally looking where it goes, not where it is.
Yeah, exact. Yeah, exactly.
Can you exit the show and just go to the store here and just want to see how it looks different than
this one or the my drama?
This one.
This one. I just want to see how the store looks cuz we noticed on my drama that No, you have the ads. We'll get to there after. But you also have a store that looks a lot like a game, right? It's a game store one.
Yeah. Here you go. Scroll down.
We come from gaming. We come from gaming uh background.
Yes, it works.
Yeah, I'm guessing it's also
um little bit different.
There is so much potential. So, so many synergies between gaming and what we call shortlumber right now. I hope that the market will understand this soon. And some of the companies actually already trying already getting this. I mean gaming companies.
Do you know of a competitor already of yours in the I mean like AI short drama

or stuff? Is there one?
I I believe that uh there are some people are trying to do something with that. I don't see that anyone is already like making money at bus soft launch stage. But I even know a couple of gaming companies that are trying to basically AI generate shows. They they got inspired after conversations with us and try to basically generate AI AI shows as well because like what what what I see right now is actually it's an amazing trend like a lot of gaming companies especially public ones who are not doing that very well right now. They're trying to reimagine themselves and they're actually exploring short drama including AI generated one.
Why? I haven't seen like the one with like this robust let's say app with like the framework and
you have a template plug in yeah again that's there and the other thing is that most of the stuff that I see is AI companions
like uh that's I think that's the primary usage of these like AI

narratives it's like AI companions basically and uh the mainstream games are also going against it I mean like Grock itself and Elon and all these other guys they're going to go after this I think niche already in like start of next year.
That that's the vision. We actually we started uh like companions uh a couple of years ago. That's the vision. You basically create this like content universe where you created one IP like a book. Then you turn book into a video series. Then you start doing AI companions. Then you do podcasts with those characters. Then you have music album basically. That's like that's exactly what they do. Like they have like WeChat integration. They have their own podcast. They have their like own super whatever.
It's even older. It's even older. It's It's even older, Jakob. If you Google Disney strategy, like Disney strategy poster, it's an amazing thing. It's a it's like a um it's if if you can find it and share the screen,
I think I'll just I'll just explain because because you you actually you

your point was great about uh about this AP strategy Disney strategy poster. I think I have
black black and white thing.
Black and white thing. Oh, this one.
Yes, that that's the the genius of Walt Disney. If you can enlarge it. Basically, this is what Walt Disney drew on a train somewhere in the 1950s something. I think this is basically the whole strategy. You can see like in the center of everything there is IP creation. Like you create a a movie. Then it shows how you use different assets from that movie like music for example. Then you create a comic book out of a movie. Then you create like a park experience like offline experience. So basically he his genius was about like creating IP and repurposing that IP in different forms and distributing it in different forms. We just building this but for for current consumption habits and for with with current technology.
Yeah. But this was 1917 or 19 what
we're like 100 years ago.

It it was long ago. Yeah, that that's the genius. It's it's nothing new. They're just building it with new technology and with the new distribution platforms.
Yeah, there's really nice example. Thanks for pointing out. [laughter]
Yeah, my jaw
while my while I pick up my jaw, right, because this has been really impressive, right? So, I'm an admon guy, right? So, I work in ad monetization. A lot of conversations I have with people is how ads take away from experience and basically cause retention to drop. you guys on My Drama, you have seven rewarded ads that you can watch every day for coins. Talk a little bit about that and then I'll tell you what my estimate is of your daily ad revenue.
Yeah. So the the the first thing that that comes to my to my mind when you ask that question is that we are we are underutilizing ads so much. They believe that ads can be I don't know like 50% of our business, but it's not right now. And yeah, because if you look at the if

you look at the evolution of short drama in China for example, they started there with inapp purchases monetization first and then they transitioned to as monetization like most of short drama in China actually is monetized with ads right now. I think this is what we we are going to see in the United States as well because essentially it will help you to expand the audience and target the users who are not ready to pay for subscription uh in our purchases and I think that the industry will be pressured to do that because we already doing this and uh other players are already doing this. It's just a matter of enough content for that and it's just a matter of uh smart optimization with that. So that that that would be my thought that we are we are definitely underutilizing the potential as that we we we have.
So how how do you go about testing this to begin with? Right. So the the cap right now is seven per day. Is there any testing that goes into there or any segmentation that you do where you give more rewarded ads to some users or what's the thinking?
Yeah, we we are running up AB tests con constantly any at any month we can run

tens of different AB tests including monetization ones. So we tested more ads and less ads as well. This is the most optimal number that we got to so far. Um
okay. So I estimate right now that basically the daily ad revenue of my drama is about 23 to 33k a day. Is that about right? Which is about 16 or 17% of the sensor tower revenue.
It's a solid estimate, but I'm not sure that that's the range.
We don't have to uh don't worry. You don't have to answer.
It's [laughter] fine.
Yeah.
I as as is is as is one of the most important point on our agenda right now. We believe that right now if you think about our 2026 for example the year we allocate a substantial amount of monetization for as like we think that by the end of the next by the end of the next year they're going to have 50% of our revenue from asization total.

You're going to test all the ad formats then.
Yeah. And do you think
do you think it's if you have more content, people are going to be more forgiving to just watch ads to unlock more content because there's already so much of it. Then they're going to be like, ah, you know, it's fine instead of just buy pushing the the purchases or like what's the kind of like reason
more content will mitigate the heat of ads on retention. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much.
I'll I'll give you uh some data here. No [ __ ] data. Maybe a little bit of [ __ ] because I checked the I I because I checked the data one month ago. So it would would be like 10 plus - 10%. So we have another app. I I I won't I won't say how what it's called, but it's the app where we monetize all of our series with ads. We specifically launched it [clears throat] separately to to to like for for it to be a sandbox for us to test different monetization options. And what we see there what we

see there are a couple of insights. The first insight is that the films that don't monetize well with subscription and enough purchases can be monetized really well with ads because the the bar for quality of the story is much lower with ads. That's the first thing. The second thing is the session duration is insane with ads. It's around 1 hour and 15 minutes per session with asmentization which is higher than Tik Tok which is higher than Tik Tok.
They literally watch the whole movie basically. Y
yeah yeah yeah exactly. And in terms of you you asked the question like how ads impact the retention. We actually we are running this control we call it control cohort where they don't see any ads at all. Like there is this 5% of people they don't see ads at all. So they just look at their metrics and ads drop the metrics by 15%. I mean retention mostly. So it's it's
even the rewarded ads.
Yeah. Even the rewarded ads

it's it's interstitial and rewarded at the same time. So we we run both of them there.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
So it's it's it's it's not that much. It's the matter like what we realize is that it's the matter of quantity of content. Do you see that? We see that we can scale that app insanely like more than my drama and our other apps if you had much more content. That's
and by content you mean people run out of stuff they see or they don't find enough stuff that's for them. So you need more to kind of capture the
very good point that that's a very good good point. So there there are there is this poverty they open all the series that we have but they don't find the content that they want to see. For example, there is a cohort of users. They want to see young adult shows shows. We have like six of them. They watch all of them, then they go and they don't find any any others. Or there is a cohort who wants to fantasy shows. We don't have enough shows in this category to basically Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.

Just to finish up on the ad stuff. So, one of the big differences in the store in My Drama and Real Shorts is that they also try to reward users in an offer wall style thing where they send users to play their own games. Have you guys considered doing anything like that or an offer wallet in general to also monetize users?
Yes, maybe I considering this right now, especially given that we have a lot of products that are complimentary to each other. So you're you're going to see experiments in the future in terms of the in terms of the point that we don't have enough content. Yakub you you asked about that. So um that's one of the that's one of the reasons that I I really believe that combining short drama and games can be super powerful because one of the main challenges for short drama is that users consume content really fast. So the consumption of content is super fast and the retention if you compare it to gaming for example the retention is much lower. So at the same time CPI is quite low. CPI is quite low and engagement is

amazing. So if you think about this and for example if you combine short drama with some high retention gaming mechanics and you try to space out consumption in time so that you place play the game sometime then you go watch series I think it's going to be a powerful mix and someone who is going to figure this out first will scale a lot. So you basically want to have love and these place plus the short drama of them together in one app.
That that that good comparison. Yeah. Or I don't know like think of uh I will be saying random stuff because we we haven't done deep research but think of I don't know uh like some board game and uh short drama or or merge game and short drama. For example, I was a speaker um I was a speaker at this event. It was by organized by Meta. It's called like short drama event and there was a speaker from sensor tower and he was showing their latest research on the intersection of gaming gaming audience and short drama audience and there was an a really interesting slide from the research I don't know whether you you've

guys seen it maybe you've seen it so I won't be saying anything new to you but but the interesting thing that I found there is that users of short drama overindex in terms of the usage time within different cohorts of games and like the first game was social casino. I think it's like they're uh they're like 400 they spend 400 more 400% more time than users who don't watch short drama. There was puzzle games, there was like merge games and at the same time what sensor tower tower found is that true drama is actually stealing engagement from from games now.
So basically that there is this like really logical thesis right now of exploring combin some some kind of combination here. No, that's why you mention that's why you mentioned the the public companies with the the gaming public companies are exploring this because the engagement is quite high on the short dramas and then if you combine it with your games and your portfolio and suddenly you add the short drama app then you kind of steal basically the

users and these users are highly high engagement and then you just send it back to your games basically as a again as a funnel. So CPI is low for short drama, keep it there, entertain and then send it back to your games.
It's basically missing the metag game layer, man. Like if you imagine that for instance like if you go to the AI app because this is also one of the problems of like love and deep space, they have like so much content that they need to create for all those guys that they're running in the gacha and is recycling itself because like they run on this like concept of memories. They cannot add like so many characters all the time. It's like adding memories of those characters which are like the new characters whatever and again why AI you can create all these things and the mini gamess and the loops they're running is basically like like lineage of their memories and like decision trees and all these other things which are kind of very easy to do actually like the only block there is the content itself you need to animate it created voice over da da da da da which AI can help with a lot. Yeah, to to to your point guys and you know like the first thing what what we started thinking about when we

launched my drama is that what will happen if we combine interactive stories like choose your own adventure game with the vertical series like not not two separate apps but in one app so that for example you play but then you watch video series and they actually ran experiments but the experiments was was very I don't think it was very thoughtful experience because you essentially combine things with two things with lower retention and with low CPI instead of combining one thing with OPI [laughter] and low lower retention plus super high retention but high CPI. I think you have to find that combination.
Yeah. I mean look Jacob I can I can imagine the let's say metry game you run out the lives instead of going to another metry game you go short watch a short drama and then you go back.
It is all about the meta hooks man like people will do whatever they want them to do. You just need to find like let's say sustainable core to kind of keep them running.
I mean put in the meta like we have these things.

That's why I was saying are we not talking about the the sophisticated on boarding which is the carnival tycoon stuff which is great for people.
Exactly. Exactly. So now instead of using thronfall in forex you just use short drama on boarding and then just keep them [laughter] keep them entertained then just shovel them with forex. Have we seen GTA YC to be like the you know onboarding now for social casino like that that's what's happening on on mobile site so why why this shouldn't happen like it's just a matter of time basically here.
Yeah. So the interesting question here I guess from hearing what Jakob is saying to bring it all together. So you're talking about basically keeping all users in your funnel. So I have to ask then since you show seven rewarded ads a day or users can't see him. What do you have a leakage in your whole pipeline right? When when you say when you say leakage what what do you mean in this case?
Basically people competitors people pay competitors like who do you block?
We block we block competitors. Okay. Of course.
No no no no no not not essentially. I I

don't think we can block all competitors because every single day like five or 10 new new shirt drama apps pop up. So we cannot block everyone.
Fair enough.
I guess the top ones.
Yeah we block the top ones. Getting back to gaming as well. I think another another big opportunity is using short drama as user acquisition vehicle for gaming because one of the evolutions in China of vertical series is that they monetize like there is admentization and there is branded content. When I say branded content I mean like vertical video series about I don't know McDonald's or about uh any other company. So it's like the vertical series about uh like a couple that meet at McDonald's. uh they they do something there and stuff like that. So essentially you're promoting natively promote promoting models by
yes but but it's integrated everywhere and I think it's a huge opportunity opportunity for game like imagine I don't know like scoply the monopoly go there is a v vertical video series about

monopoly go and vertical video series are getting so so many so so many impressions like they are generating around three billion impressions monthly right now on socials like imagine that amount of impressions for for the So the opportunity here is amazing. Like I hope those gaming companies that innovate fast, they'll do they'll start doing here some something. I think like the the synergy is amazing here.
No, it sounds very interesting. I have one more question regarding the content I guess before maybe guys have some other stuff. Uh I haven't noticed this with the competitors, but do I get it right that you run these kind of gold exclusive shows like exclusive exclusive like really behind payable like not like unlocked later? Yeah, it's uh uh it's normally shows like there is this thing called like first window monetization in content. Nobody monet like it works as a premiere for example like a movie a movie just comes out um you you can if

you go for example to I don't know like Apple TV uh if there is a new movie just comes out you can buy it with uh you can buy it with a separate not purchase or you can go to like cinema and watch
you need to buy the separate purchase.
Yeah. Yeah.
But then later you can watch it with with subscription. So it's it's about the same.
We demonetize this as first video. Okay. Okay. Okay.
You want to watch it now or you wait 3 months and then you watch it for free?
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Like I I think I think Real Show doesn't have this like they if I understand they have maybe some kind of like before release or some I don't know haven't opened the app for a long time so can can really tell but yeah it's quite interesting here I think especially if you can as you said if you have very high quality content I guess this drives conversions.
This I love it. I love it because all of these all of these basically shows you you are you you can use as as a UA videos and you are definitely using them. So it's like it's amazing. You do like two two stones in one.

I love it.
Let's check creative velocity before.
I mean
yeah you can you can go there and I was very very positively surprised because
really
yeah they're paying attention.
This is our new metric that we judge everyone. How many creatives that you have in the last
last 30 days? 5,700.
How many does
this is this is
how many days? How many days?
Last creatives basically.
This is not even
so far. It's it's it's it's so far away from truth.
Yeah.
I think I think the the challenge with sensor tower is that it doesn't track creatives that direct users to web. And I don't mean web web as they like as web funnel but web as web
web to web. I think I mean uh it's there you can click and then you see the the landing page but it's not natively towards like the the app. So that's always preferred. So I know like if we go to let's say Facebook or Tik Tok gallery like this is going to be just never ending.
Yeah.
But only if even if if this is true I

mean if well it's it's more so 5,700 in comparison to like
just the ones we see.
Yeah. just once you see which in comparison to the gaming industry already very solid number and if it's more then it's even better because
it's 15,000 per month 15,000
my life nice [laughter]
that's more than vaong right no
vayong is 23,000
blog blog okay so the question is like why 15,000
because I have my assumptions and we talk about it but we need to we need to hear it from
somebody that actually runs it Yes.
Yeah. There there are there are there are a lot I'm sure that and you you're talking about this a lot and I'm happy that someone in the industry is talking about this that there is a huge change on meta right now which which is going on called Andromeda. Andromeda is getting to everyone. This is like this is the new algorithm for for meta to basically test test creatives and define which creatives are going to work. So

basically the the main update of uh the main update for for the the main thing about this update is that Meta doesn't like similar creatives right now. So if like before the strategy was to basically maximize the number of small iterations because you you create one creative it works really well you create thousands of iterations you you launch them and they work as well. Right now Meta likes diversity that's the main thing. So basically they don't give a lot of impressions to similar creatives. That is one change. So one of the main reasons that we are running so many creatives right now is that we are basically we are testing different hypothesis in terms of creative styles in terms of creative length in terms of in ter and and and a lot of other things like we are testing a lot of diversity but the main reason why there are so many creatives is because we are promoting like each show for us is like an asset. Each show is like a game. Think of each show as a game and we create a lot of creatives to promote

each show.
So that's the main reason why why you see so many creatives and the main reason why we have to run so many creatives and that that's a big barrier to entry in the niche by the way because imagine imagine how many motion designers you have to hire to build this. If if if you created this with motion designers we would need I think around 400 motion designers right now. But we the good number of white out survival in the top 4x games that we talk about. That sounds about right.
But we built our internal AI tool which basically creates most of the creatives right now.
Yeah, that's my question here. Do I get that right that all of these creatives are basically parts of the movies and you don't create specifically content for marketing with the actors?
We create this content for marketing but we call it marketability and that marketability is already part of our shows. So basically on the um on the stage of script writing our creative marketing managers they already insert the scenes that they need on marketing

creative.
That's what I wanted to hear.
This is very very important.
So the show already made with marketing in mind. So there would be this whatever controversial scene that we're going to use for creative and we already into the movie. Yeah.
The ideal show the ideal show is just a lone marketing creative.
Yeah. Exactly.
That's amazing. The whole show is the loan marketing creative
like the measure of success of the show is that when our creative managers don't need to do anything they just take the show and they say that's something that we are going to just run they're just going to cut that in episodes and we just going to run it on Facebook.
Okay perfect that's that's what you need that's and that's what we also wanted to hear.
This is this is amazing.
This is perfect. But yeah,
there are there are so many nuances guys. There are AI generated AI AI generated scenes. Um there are like you can create a story from different series in one creative there there there is a lot.
So do I get it right that this is the

biggest creative variety we have on the port
yet? Almost probably.
Most probably. Yes.
How many employees are you guys?
200.
200.
I love it. No, because we we usually when we talk to to companies, gaming companies, and they're like, "Oh my god, you know, we are 30 people team and they're making like five million a month and they have like seven creatives." It's like, "Guys, that's not enough.
But we're a small team. Who the [ __ ] cares?" Like, just use your brain. That's it. Tools, external part.
They're probably running traffic on on Applavvin and other networks, right? where where one creative can live for for for
a long time a long period of time. That's true.
But you said also kind of up and integral and like some some other networks besides the the Tik Tok and then Facebook obviously.
Yeah, we we are definitely running those networks. They are performing okay, but they're not our main traffic source.
I mean obvious for obvious reasons basically
definitely need to work with more

playables and then you will be fine
on on SDK. They said I couldn't make ads without the dev team. They said I [music] wouldn't understand the tech. Guess what? I just made a fully working gorgeous [music] top to play while eating noodles and watching trash TV and taking care of my daughter. All thanks to playable makeup. No code, no stress, no cheap sherlock.
Yeah, it works.
That that that's true.
Anything else you wanted to say here, Mate? Now, I'm honestly I'm just blown away since
we've been talking for an hour, right?
I'm blown away since the minute 20 or maybe 10. I was like, [ __ ] this is awesome.
Like I think every single like one of these games that we review should hear just this marketing segment of like how it's done segments like like literally like no, you don't do this. You do this. Go.
Yeah.
Let's watch this. I'm just going to clip it. This is amazing. That's great. So, like what's the what's the then the 2026

for for you guys? Like how does that look like? Because from what I just heard, it's going to be [ __ ] amazing and it's going to be huge.
Yeah.
I mean, every year is amazing. Like for us, for for me, every year is like managing a new company. Every single year at the end of the year, I say that I I I I manage a new company. It just looks looks so different. I think like next year what we're going to see is that we're going to see that we are turning into this goto vertical video streaming platform for the studios for the big studios from uh from Hollywood. That's one of the things we really believe that we can build synergy there. So that's uh that's one thing we are going to capitalize on our partnership with Fox and other studios as well. Our hope is that we will be able to expand generous to male audience as well. Male audience is now super small for vertical video series. So we're going to we're going to get there and expand our audience. I believe that we're going to make a lot of progress in AI. The traction is amazing

and we're going to continue putting focus there and developing our internal tools. Internal tools for content generation. That's another thing. And uh I believe that you're going to see our first experiments with combining vertical series and some game mechanics. I really believe in that. It's going to be either with some gaming studio or we are going to do it ourselves. We know how to do games. We are not the best at games, but we know how to do them, how to make them. So, this is something that you're going to see and probably you're going to see some new content forms for from us like anime and maybe maybe something else.
Let's just finish on that. Wow.
Oh, man.
This is recording. Yeah.
Thanks very much for sharing a lot of insight. We learned a lot like Definitely.
Oh,
thank you guys. You said no [ __ ] right? I just
Exactly.
Yes. Very good. Very good. Thanks. Thank you very much for coming. And also uh the listeners, thank you very much for listening. And if you have any questions, ask them comments or just join this live channel. Ban them if you want. You can [music] leave your email

or contact details so they can ask you or if they want to work with with you guys produce content [music] or anything, we'll put it in the show notes.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm happy to share. Yeah.
Awesome.
Happy to share.
Thank you. Thank you very much, guys. See you next time. and please stay. Don't don't leave yet. Don't leave yet.
I thank you guys for inviting.
Thank you. Now,