Netflix was already worried about the leak of its series on TikTok, now it can worry about Reelshort. This Chinese app, launched in 2022, has just experienced a surge in popularity, especially among American women.
It just surpassed ten million downloads in December, while two months ago it only reached one million, says the Wall Street Journal.
The concept of the application, which has just arrived in France, is simple but ambitious: to make users become addicted to series in a format very far from that of Netflix. Each episode is designed to fit into a format of just one minute. The very catchy scenarios are totally designed for young women.
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The series is produced entirely by Crazy Maple Studio, parent company of Reelshort and owned by its founder, Joey Jia, a former employee of large Chinese technology companies. They are filmed in a few days in the United States, explains the Wall Street Journal, and the actors are mainly theater school students and aspiring actors. Everything is done to reduce production costs.
In addition to extravagant romances with multiple twists and turns, Reelshort offers series starring vampires, werewolves, and rich, lonely heirs. At the moment, the miniseries that works best on Reelshort is called “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband,” notes the Wall Street Journal.
To encourage users to watch its content, Reelshort has just released the first 20 episodes for free on YouTube; The video has already accumulated more than 6 million views.
Episode endings use and abuse “cliffhangers,” these scriptwriting practices dedicated to luring the viewer into the next episode. Each series is made up of between 60 and 90 60-second episodes.
One minute of episode for three of advertising.
But where the problem lies is in the economic model of the application. If the first episode is free, you will need to watch ads to access subsequent episodes. Advertisements that, according to user reviews published in the Play Store, Google’s application store, are much longer than the miniepisodes themselves.
An application created to “encourage people to buy”, “the scam of the century”, “we lose the pleasure of the movie”, “thirty seconds of advertising for one minute of the series”: in the Play Store, the first comments published by French users are not really very favorable.
And with good reason: if you want to get rid of these ads, you can pay each episode separately for a few euros. A base price that, in the end, makes the entire series cost much more than a month of streaming subscription or a movie ticket.
Reelshort has clearly stepped into a gap opened by Tiktok. For several months now, we have been finding episodes of popular series or movies on the Chinese social network cut into dozens and dozens of mini-episodes. game of Thrones, The office either Strange things They are followed, every few minutes, by millions of Tiktok users.
Source: BFM TV
