My Drama vs ReelShort: The Non-Chinese Challenger

The scoreboard first — and yes, it is lopsided:

Searches comparing these two apps usually want to know which is "better". Wrong question. ReelShort is the category's gravity: 35.7 minutes a day per US user — more mobile time than Netflix (24.8), Prime Video (26.9) or Disney+ (23). The right question is which revenue model is still standing in three years.

Holywater — co-CEOs Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov, founded in Kyiv in early 2020, now split between Kyiv and Porto — launched My Drama in spring 2024, openly inspired by ReelShort. Eighteen months later it is the only non-Chinese name in the global top tier: $38.3M in 2025 overseas IAP, up from $14.4M in 2024; group revenue $70M in 2025, tripled year over year, with a stated $1B target for 2026 that we file under ambition, not forecast.

Three things separate the model. Revenue quality: 70% of 2025 revenue came from subscriptions — everyone else in the top tier chases coins. Capital: a $22M Series A (January 2026, Horizon Capital with Endeavor Catalyst and Wheelhouse) — the largest micro-drama investment outside Asia — on top of Fox Entertainment taking equity in October 2025 with a 200-title commitment and a cast list that reads like network TV: Jon Hamm, Minnie Driver, Ken Jeong, Hannah Waddingham. Cost discipline: ~$100K per season with an AI-assisted pipeline, about 40% under the industry's $150–300K range. The exposed flank is acquisition: $20–30 per install (per Kasianov, MIP London, Feb 2026) is a heavy toll when your competitor prints impressions from a $1.2B war chest.

ReelShort — NewLeaf Publishing under Crazy Maple Studio, with China's COL Group holding ~49%, founder Joey Jia, launched August 2022 — runs the category. $1.2B in 2025 consumer spending, $35.99M in the month of November 2025 alone, 27% global market share, ~370M cumulative downloads. Growth is accelerating, not plateauing: MAU rose 222% year over year. Its next act is geographic — Brazil has become its #1 download market (21.96% of May 2025 installs, ahead of the US at 9.29%), with local production spinning up across LatAm and telco bundles in Thailand and the Philippines.

The asterisk used to be profitability. At roughly $400M of 2024 revenue ReelShort was loss-making, and it still ended 2025 about $12M in the red — marketing weight and content amortization ate the line. That is turning: Media Partners Asia projects $1.05B of 2026 revenue (+34%), around $63M of EBITDA and $40M of net income. Seventy percent of its downloads are still paid installs, so the war chest is still doing the work — but the line is now projected to close at roughly a 3.8% net margin. It is a distributor's margin, not a publisher's: real, thin, and hostage to acquisition costs staying below what a coin buyer spends.

For viewers: ReelShort for the deepest romance catalog and the platform everyone talks about; My Drama for a subscription that caps your spending and production values increasingly backed by real Hollywood talent.

For the market read: ReelShort has proven demand at billion-dollar scale, and the 2026 outlook finally puts a margin next to it — a thin one. My Drama has proven the only alternative revenue model in the category — and got Fox to underwrite the IP pipeline — without proving it can grow past a 30× gap while paying $20–30 per user. Not David versus Goliath; more like a refinery versus an oil gusher. The gusher is spectacular. The refinery is what still runs when the crude gets expensive. Watch two numbers in 2026: whether ReelShort's projected margin survives contact with its acquisition costs, and My Drama's subscription share — if it holds near 70% while revenue triples again, Holywater will have built the category's first durable P&L outside China... and DramaBox's.