DramaShorts co-founder Leo Ovdiienko has learned that even if audiences can not always be trusted to tell you what they really want, the numbers never lie.
The vertical short dramas app hosts 1-to-2 minute-long chapters of films about cheating scandals and mafia bosses, with titles like “Pregnancy Contract” and “Maid in Mafia Family.” The content, which Ovdiienko labeled himself as a “guilty pleasure,” keeps audiences hooked whether they would like to admit it or not.
After launching in May 2024, Ovdiienko’s platform reaches a monthly active user base of 5 million. His European platform is attempting to rival the Chinese market, which popularized this form of storytelling.
The short drama industry, inspired partly by TikTok but has taken a life as its own medium largely driven by international markets, has grown significantly in the past year. Compared to the latter half of 2024, average monthly revenue for the industry is up 12% in 2025, according to WHO.
DramaShorts partners with a mobile library platform, Alpha Novel, which Ovdiienko said has been invaluable in producing content at the rate that they must to be competitive. Leaning on AlphaNovels for creative backing has been a “trampoline” for the company, the co-founder told TheWrap.
The short-form genre lends itself to high stakes – and sometimes cheesy – content, created to keep you hooked. The DramaShorts co-founder and COO said that there is a discrepancy between what viewers say they are “triggered” by and when the app notices the most engagement. Oftentimes he had to trust the analytics more than viewers because the consumer behavior did not match their verbal feedback.
With over 80% of its audience coming from social media, DramaShorts is growing quickly. The key Ovdiienko has found is to scale and increase production. In 2024 DramaShorts produced 30 original films – each broken up into dozens of short chapters. This year the platform is on track to produce 150.
The following is our full interview with Ovdiienko.
How has DramaShorts utilized social media to drive viewers to the app?
We are shooting a full movie, like one hour and a half in vertical format — a lot of cliffhangers, a lot of plot twists, make it bingeable — and you’re almost addicted to this content. Then we put it into social media, basically taking the hook and the most provocative parts, mix them all together, adding some AI sometimes, and just launch it on TikTok, Meta and YouTube shorts, and it makes wonders. We have a YouTube channel with more than 200,000 subscribers organically without any paid promotions. We just post our content, and it just went viral.
I believe why this niche is growing is because the distribution is here. People are so used to the TikTok format to Instagram Reels to YouTube Shorts at the moment, and that’s why it’s so effective.
What is different this time is the cost of production. The average movie at DramaShorts we produce it for around $100,000, and Quibi did it for a couple of millions. We are now building production so it’s cheaper to produce and better to distribute. That’s why it’s growing exponentially at the moment.
What percentage of your audience found you through social media?
I would say 80% of our audience is coming through social media: Instagram reels, Facebook reels, TikTok feed, YouTube shorts, those four channels. Meta is the biggest at the moment, TikTok second behind, and then Google, with YouTube, is behind them but still quite stable.
We show audiences the most anticipated moment of the movie. Then we lead them into our app. Then there is a subscription in order to watch the full movie. It’s subscription-based monetization, and you need a lot of content to stay relevant. Four to five premieres per week is our end goal.
How many productions are you doing a year?
In the previous year, we did 30 per year, and now we are on track to do 150, so we scaled quite considerably. We’re producing around 10 per month, and by the end of the year, we want to do 15 per month. That’s basically the required scale.
This niche originated in China, and it’s already quite mature there. And basically only 4% of players on this market control 90% of use and revenue in China at the moment, and we see a similar trend going in U.S. On scale, you have much better unit economy, you have much better retention, and basically the only way to win this market is produce more. That’s why we are building our production shooting in Europe, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, just to lower the costs, but we are also building our production in the U.S.
Now it is a good time to build your production in the U.S. There are a lot of very talented individuals who are working in this industry at the moment, and we’re just leveraging this opportunity. We are working with the guys who are ex-Disney, ex-showrunners, and they are just shooting for us. It’s their full time job at the moment.
How does the Chinese market differ from the European market?
Basically what (Europe is) doing, they take what is working in China or worked previously and adapt it to U.S. market. It’s pretty straightforward, take what is working, scale and put it on the U.S. market. We believe how we can be different is only through content.
Why this market appeals is because if you do a hit, it doesn’t matter if you have like, 1 million or 10 million or even 50 million views, you can grow exponentially. That’s why we are betting on this. For Chinese players, at the moment, they’re doing a lot of soap opera-type of movies. It works to some degree, but I believe this industry will evolve, and at some point, Netflix, Amazon will also look into it.
Do you anticipate other streamers acquiring companies in this space?
Strategic M&A, I believe in the future will happen in this market, because it’s basically a way to distribute the content. We already know that a lot of players look into this market because it’s huge. Revenue is growing like five times year over year.
This industry in China is already bigger than traditional streaming, so vertical short series are already bigger than classical media. So yes, I believe they will do it.
How do you balance engaging a wide range of people but also honing this niche?
We lean on Alpha Novel. Alpha Novel has 20,000 books on for U.S. audience and okay, this book is a best seller. If it’s a best seller from a scenario perspective, it has something in it that’s triggering for the audience, they want to read it. Our first movie was a book adaptation, and it was a super hit.
We are watching very detailed analytics. So for instance, if we have a movie that is a huge success in marketing, we watch by the second how creatives are working for the audience: where is the drop off, where is the bounce off. We know something happened here that is not interesting, so we cut everything unnecessary.
What has been the biggest surprise for you in launching DramaShorts?
We did roundtables with users, and they told us, “We don’t like this,” but those were the moments that they watched the most. It was super counterintuitive for us.
For example, when the main lead female actress gets bullied by some secondary character, and she is getting saved by the main lead, our users said, “It’s so cheesy. We don’t want it. We don’t like it.” But on the analytics side, we saw that it was the best performing moment of the whole movie.
Another example, the abusive partner, was the biggest one. They all told us they hated it. But then, from the perspective of marketing analytics, those were the best performing assets that we produce.
It’s like a guilty pleasure, this discrepancy between what users are telling us what they like and what they actually like.
How do you monetize your content?
Revenue is coming from three sources. The first main one is subscription. Second is in app purchases, in coins, if you want to watch additional content with those actors, backstages, Q&A’s. We also have view-to-unlock so you are watching ads in order to unlock content.
In terms of percentage, 70% comes from subscription, 25% from in-app purchases of coins, and 5% from ad revenue.
How have you implemented AI into production?
It was a great asset for us for horizontal scale. We are doing dubbing. We are doing subtitles, and it helps us produce a ton of content, but I can assure you, it is not writing proper scripts. We cannot use it for storytelling,
Previously, to do like a Spanish dubbing, you need two weeks and a dubbing studio and around $10,000 to do it. Now, you can do it in three hours with ElevenLabs, and it’s almost the same quality for our users.
Answering how we grew so fast and went global, AI definitely helped, especially with localization, translations, audio and the number of assets that we can replicate.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
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