“Some people make movies for dreams. But our purpose in storytelling is solely to sell. A story that doesn’t sell is garbage.”

The speaker is Joey Jia, founder and CEO of Crazy Maple Studio, the company behind ReelShort. And if that statement sounds jarring, the numbers back it up. The vertical video app, launched in August 2022, has already crossed 100 million downloads across the Apple App Store and Google Play. Its revenue hit $214 million in 2024, up from $36 million the year before, and the current run rate points to over $1.2 billion in 2025. In the attention economy, ReelShort is cashing in by serving up exactly what Jia says it does: stories that sell.

Jia, a Chinese-American tech entrepreneur, founded Crazy Maple Studio in San Francisco in 2017. The studio is backed by Beijing-based digital publisher COL Group, which holds a 49% stake. Under his direction, ReelShort has turned the Chinese format of duanju—short, vertical soap operas packed with cliffhangers—into a global phenomenon. The app specializes in one- to two-minute episodes filmed in English with U.S. casts in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York. The plots are unabashedly high-drama: billionaires in disguise, secret heiresses, revenge arcs. And they work.

The Jia Playbook: Commerce Over Art

ReelShort did not invent the microdrama. Platforms in China have been churning out duanju for years. What Jia did was nail the localization and the business model. He treats content as a product, not a calling. The proof is in the production: the company spends an estimated five to nine times more on user acquisition than on actually making the shows. Gross margins exceed 60% after app-store fees, but the business remains loss-making—a calculated trade-off to build audience scale.

The viewing model is “aggressive freemium.” Users watch a few episodes free, then pay $0.20 to $0.50 per episode to continue, or they can watch ads to earn coins. It is a familiar mobile-gaming loop, and it has propelled ReelShort to the global number one spot for in-app purchases in early 2025. The app maintains a 4.6-star rating on the App Store and 4.3 on Google Play, driven by a constant stream of new titles that feed the algorithm.

User acquisition costs are sky-high: ReelShort reportedly spends $50 million a month on ads across Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. The result is a loss today for a market-dominant position tomorrow, a playbook borrowed from Uber and DoorDash. Hit series underline the formula. The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband has clocked over 500 million views. True Heiress vs. Fake Queen Bee has 435 million. Others like Found A Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas (391 million views) and Move Aside! I’m the Final Boss (311 million) are not far behind. These are not prestige projects. They are, as Jia would frame it, high-performance commercial inventory.

The strategy has earned industry validation. In 2024, Crazy Maple Studio landed on the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter.

Global Ambitions, Local Casts

ReelShort is not content with dominating the English-language market. Over the past year, it has struck a series of deals that map out a worldwide expansion.

In May 2025, the company inked a collaboration with Colombian broadcaster Caracol Televisión, as reported by Deadline. The partnership, an expansion of a 2024 licensing deal, now includes producing original Spanish-language content. For Jia, Latin America is a logical next step: large mobile-first audiences, high smartphone penetration, and a proven appetite for telenovela-style storytelling.

Then came the Asia-Pacific push. On December 2, 2025, ReelShort announced a multi-year exclusive partnership with AR Asia Productions, a Hong Kong-based firm, to accelerate content production and platform expansion across the region, as covered by Variety. The deal positions AR as the exclusive agency for ReelShort’s growth in APAC, tapping into a market where short-form video is already mainstream.

The most recent move, in April 2026, saw ReelShort launch in Southeast Asia through a deal with AIS, Thailand’s largest 5G network operator, as reported by Reuters. The “5G ReelShort” add-on package marks the company’s first telco partnership, using AIS’s subscriber base to bootstrap distribution. Thailand serves as the launchpad for what Jia hopes will be a broader regional footprint.

The $10 Million Creator Bet

Despite the broadcaster and telco alliances, Jia has often said he envisions ReelShort evolving into a professional user-generated content (PUGC) platform. To that end, he committed a $10 million fund to support independent creators who pitch their own shows. The fund invites writers and directors to submit show bibles; selected pitches get full production support from Crazy Maple Studio, with creators earning a share of in-app purchase revenue. It echoes YouTube’s early Partner Program, but with a higher barrier to entry: each pitch must demonstrate commercial viability upfront.

Critics might scoff at the quality of the storytelling, but Jia is unbothered. He believes vertical video is the future of entertainment—a conviction that looks less eccentric every quarter as the numbers roll in. For an app that calls its own art “garbage,” ReelShort has built a durable castle. The question now is not whether microdramas are a passing fad, but how many more markets will open their wallets to Jia’s particular brand of commercial storytelling.