🎭 Drama Pops Review: Why short drama could be the future of Mobile Entertainment?

Yeah.

And how do you decide on what content to produce?

Do you ask users or basically do you look at competing apps or do you just look after dramatic themes on TikTok?

Or like how do you decide on that?

Actually a little bit of that, a little bit of that.

You have to follow the trends, of course, in social media, in

web novels, in

interactive stories apps.

So if there is an emerging trend, in an emerging trend, Trop or something,

you should act fast because the

like the timeline of producing a new series is it's about three months.

So

not like long.

So, yeah, it's not like when you, all right, I'm going to do a vampire doctor story.

You can't like do it in a week or so.

It's 4 a.m.

and we're rolling the dice.

Bate drops, knowledge made of gold and ice.

Felix with ads making those coins rise.

Jack up designs, worlds chasing the sky.

We're the two and a half gamers, the midnight crew.

Talking UA adverts and game design too.

Mateish, Felix, Shaku, bringing the insight.

We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight.

But K UA, master, eyes on the prize.

Tracking data through the cyberspace skies.

Felix stacks colors like a wizard in disguise.

Jackups crafting realms, lift us to the highs.

Two and a half gamers talking smack.

Slow hockey sick, got your back.

Ads are beautiful, they like the way.

Click it fast, don't delay.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Oh, hello.

Hello there.

Good to even see you.

Thank you very much for coming to this episode.

It's brought to you by our sponsors, PVX Partners, the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing.

If you're scaling your business and need funding, here's the deal.

With PVX Partners, you can grow your game easily and your business.

There's no equity dilution.

you can repay as you get paid, and it's flexible, fast, and fully tailored to your growth.

So, you can secure funding in 30 days and get a term sheet in just 24 hours.

Don't you wait, take control of your UA budget without giving away

a piece of your company.

Visit pvxpartners.com and see how they can help you grow your game faster and stronger.

Don't wait, go to pvxpartners.com.

And while you have you here, we also want to your sponsors, Vibe.co, because this episode is brought to you by them as well.

They can help you grow your brand on CTV ads.

With Vibe, you can launch high-impact campaigns across top streaming platforms like Hulu, Roku, Toby, and whatever else.

I mean, all from one simple dashboard.

We don't have all of these in Europe.

Anyway, so it's built for brand all sizes.

It's rated on 4.8 out of 5 on G2 for a reason.

Join over 5,000 marketing teams already scaling with streaming TV.

Visit vibe.com to get started.

That's vibe.co.

Join them.

And thank you very much for joining us for this special episode.

Now let's get back to it.

Thank you.

Hello, everybody.

This is another episode of Two and a Half Gamers.

But this one is very special.

It's going to be very dramatic as well.

My name is Matti Alan Cheric.

I'm Felix Broberg,

and we

are

a cappella.

I told you,

okay.

Well, sometimes in the future, we have two special guests, so no one, but two, guys.

Welcome to the podcast.

Please introduce yourself and the company, and then we will take it from there because today we're talking about

drama pop

nice drama pops.

Yes, there you go, perfect.

We got the rhythm of the acapella.

Hello, everybody.

I'm Burkay.

I'm the product manager of Drama Pops, which is a short drama app that is under the roof of a beautiful company called Codway.

We're here to talk about the short drama industry.

It's great to see you and can't wait to discuss about short drama concept and our beautiful app, Drama Pops.

Let's see how it goes.

Welcome, guys.

We are a big fan of the short drama genre, I would say.

Kind of.

We're also big fans of Codeway.

Yeah.

For those listeners who don't know what Codeway is, Google it.

Yeah, they're one of

Turkey's most

successful app companies kind of up there competing with what you expect.

You know what Codeway is?

Google it.

Google it.

Let me Google it for you.

of the podcast.

Yes, thank you very much for coming.

Google everything.

Yeah.

You can take it from there, I guess.

Yeah,

I guess enough Googling for you.

Yeah, okay.

Thank you very much.

To give a brief introduction of Codeway, we have

in a more serious tone.

We're a mobile app studio.

We have more than 40

apps in both mobile markets and also web platforms.

In

total of our portfolio, we have more than 350 million users.

We've been operating for five years now, and we're

growing rapidly.

We're on a

roll at the moment.

We're building more apps, building audience.

And Drama Pops is one of the more recent ventures of CodeWave.

The graph looks very healthy.

Yeah, the graph looks very healthy.

Just so listeners know, there's currently April saying something like 13 million plus in IP revenue, which I guess is not the whole revenue because there's no ad revenue here.

And web store, and web store revenue, and web store revenue, of course, on top of it.

And downloads also looks pretty healthy with something like 11 million downloads just for last month.

So that's their overall studio is breaching 300 million downloads and 300 million IP revenue.

You just heard it's more than 350 million.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Of course, we're just saying like sensitive numbers here.

So we know the scale.

I think we

like the for me, for instance, the moment I knew about Codeway was when

you had the chat bot,

chatbot before OpenAI on the stores.

That's why I think I heard about it.

That was a pretty smart move.

I mean, obviously.

Pretty smart.

Okay, so we're talking about drama pops today.

Let's look at the numbers first.

So, this was released or soft launched basically last August, and now it's scaling to something like

50k IP a day.

But again, this I would expect to be heavily

added revenue added on top of it, and also web store revenue or like web revenue.

So, we can see really everything here.

So,

if you can talk about the additional like web store or ad revenue, is it like more more than fifty percent of the revenue we see on uh Senzo Tower or more than sixty percent, seventy percent, or it's double actually?

Blink twice at least, if it's more.

Well, to give you guys a uh better view, uh we don't have a app uh I'm sorry, we don't have a

platform yet.

We of course do some web to app uh trials, etc.

The ad revenue part of it is not like a major

revenue stream, but of course there is an ad revenue on top of that, on top of the

IP revenue.

Yep.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So if we actually look at the app itself, this looks quite familiar if listeners or viewers remember our real short episode.

So it's using the usual kind of Netflix-like layout that pretty much all of the short drama

apps are using.

And yeah, the good thing about the short drama market is that now we finally have it as a separate tag in the sensor tower category.

So just by looking at it now, we don't need to swim through all the Netflixes and Hulus and all all the other Stream platforms.

So there's actually this specific category, which is an evolution of the interactive story category as we talk during the real short episode.

So download wise, there's whatever Drama Box is for instance doing something like eighteen million downloads a month.

Real short is doing 16 million downloads a month.

Cuckoo TV, I don't even know what that is.

That's like again 18 million.

Just so you get the scale, like what are the top

kind of genre leaders here?

Real short, of course, being the revenue leader with 35 million a month.

Yeah,

when we discussed it, it was 26.

It was last year.

Let me double-check.

It was 26.

So, yeah, this is going really rapidly up and yeah, you can see it that it's pretty much a straight line up even if I do monthly so they're hitting record revenue pretty much every single month

exactly and the downloads curve still looks very healthy and it's also hitting record downloads numbers like this is the the format we'll be doing that Netflix was supposed to do but never did rather than spending money on what they were random triple A gaming studios and stuff that doesn't make any sense.

Burka, how did you ended up doing actually in drama pops?

Yeah.

Well,

all mobile app studios were aware of the short drama trend.

Of course, as Coldway, as a major player in the mobile app industry, we were also aware of that trend for a while.

But it's not, of course, an easy decision to jump into that market because it's not a it's not something we used to do as like tech companies it's more it seems more like a thing for like content companies to do but

as a tech company we had to learn about production we have to learn more about content producing and we had to learn about filming industry

this was of course a discussion amongst ourselves and

but at the end we were we were confident in ourselves and we decided to take the leap and start doing.

We

started from scratch, to be honest.

We didn't know anything about production.

We didn't know anything about content production.

We learned on the way and now we're producing more and more hit series.

It was not an easy decision, but

we are glad that we took it.

And when you launch, just out of curiosity, like how many of these series do you actually need to launch the app?

So you actually have some content.

This is 10, is it 20?

Is it five?

I think we had about 11 series at the beginning.

There is not a definite answer to that, of course.

Some apps launched with like three content

in the app.

Some apps just license a catalog of like

not very good content and put them on the app just to fill the library and launch the app with that.

But of course, that

never results with growth because those content are not good and they are heavily like used with all the other apps as well.

But to launch the app, you have to have a library.

We started with about 10 to 15, I think about 15

content.

But as I said, that

depends on your decision.

Yeah, let's talk a little bit about like more product side.

Because by the way, I'm still kind of disappointed that I haven't found the vampire thing here, even though in the beginning it was asking me my preferences, like wherewith.

So, so I found the werewolf one because there's the usual alpha story.

It's like I've seen it everywhere pretty much, but haven't seen the vampire one.

Because I always like to see how much production budget you put put into these like fantasy themed movies, because that's like a big difference between the usual like billionaire CEO, whatever, drama story where you need like sword and shit.

That's great.

But yeah, anyway, so let me just finish the feature set.

So we have the usual, as I said, Netflix layout with all the stories with a recommendation engine in the front and then basically a list with tagging.

Then we have the Discover tab, which is again the same as the one in Real Show, which pretty much works a little bit like TikTok, where you just skim through trailers of all of those stories and pretty much end up watching from this

tab directly the one you want.

Then we have the rewards tab, which is the monetization part.

I guess we'll talk about profile is pretty much just profile, not really much to it.

Uh but the rewards tab is is working a little bit different.

So there's a

and and your system also works a little bit different because it's based on this kind of ticketing machine rather than the currency.

Because if I understand correctly, you don't have yet interactive content, then you can like choose the way

how you do it in real shot, for instance, so like pay for a different scenario during the story.

You don't have that yet.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, yeah.

So I guess that's planned for later,

something like that.

But yeah, this is, as I said, a little bit different because that would need its own separate currency.

We don't need that.

So now we just have the tickets.

So there's daily reward tickets, there's tickets for ads, there's the VIP program, which I guess makes the bulk of the revenue, and then manual refilling of the tickets.

Did I said it right?

That the weekly VIP is the main main bulk of the revenue?

It's

actually it's both the consumable products and the subscriptions are both like major revenue streams, I can say.

Okay, okay, okay.

That's good, good to know.

Yeah, so pretty standard feature set.

Regarding the stories themselves, like if you go into it, those are as as usual, like the 60 to 90 minutes.

Seconds, 60 to 90 seconds, not minutes.

What do you mean?

60 to 90 episodes per one story.

Each one of those is 60 episodes.

Because you said 60 to 90 minutes is like, wait, wait a second.

Yeah, 60 to 90 minutes.

The whole, whole, whole movie, basically.

The whole movie.

Yes, but it's like it's cut into short.

That's what I'm going to say.

Okay.

So, for instance, here I have a story that I need to continue only if I, again, pay or like use my tickets.

Unfortunately, guys, you won't get any revenue out of Yakoop.

So

as always.

As always.

So if we go here, we have the episode list.

As you see, it's pretty much there.

So it works on the premise that first few episodes are always unlocked.

You get the user hooked on, and then it goes into the format that you need to actually pay tickets.

There's very...

comfortable option of tickets being used without you even knowing so it pretty much drains down on them very very fast.

So that's done pretty well.

And then,

how do I get out of this one?

Yeah, let me get back.

So, then you pretty much choose what you like, and in you go.

There's, as I said, recommendation engine.

I haven't seen the upcoming tab that I've seen in Real Short, if I understood.

So, I guess this still is a little bit like after the feature set setup because I know that I'm sorry, but I literally get spammed with real short PR people to talk about their new stories or whatever like they somehow found my email and want me to can do some reveals about them so how how do you approach this kind of content on the carrot treadmill yeah we do have an upcoming section actually but we make it visible or hidden time to time depends on the the pipeline content pipeline actually.

If we don't have a lot of content we can show on the upcoming section.

Sometimes it's

sometimes

it works very well planned, but sometimes it's kind of like agile to

release those contents.

We may not have the time to

plan ahead for the upcoming section, so we we make it hidden sometimes.

Okay.

And about the spamming part of things, we

we don't

do it as as much as other china-based short junk companies i think but of course the push notifications are a an important part of this because this is

different than the other like utility apps games etc we have new content coming

in

in short intervals so we have to let the audience know

we have a new content that might interest them.

But yeah.

And here comes the million dollar question for me.

Like, how do you decide on what content to make and where do you make the content and how much it costs?

Yeah, that's that's the second core.

That's the next one.

Well,

you have to have all kinds of content.

That's the first thing because all these streaming platforms, all the RTT platforms have as much as content that you are not able to finish.

So I'm talking about platforms like Netflix or HBO or other big streaming platforms.

And the Chinese, China-based short-drummer platforms have the similar library because

they've been doing this.

Well, this is an industry that has emerged in the last two years, but it was around in China since like

2019.

So

they have a lot bigger catalogs because they've been in this for like five years, six years.

So they have thousands of short dramas

shot in Chinese, of course.

But they have the catalogue.

So we have to

there are tons of subjects that can be shot, produced as a content.

We just do everything one by one.

That's the I mean, we don't like decide, we just pick something out of the bag.

That's not not randomly, but we have a list that we want to do.

We do them in order.

Okay.

Okay.

And

are you getting to the point?

That's basically what I was like

saying in the beginning.

Like, you need to cater to all these audiences.

So if I come in and I don't see my vampire CEO, then I leave because I'm going after vampire CEOs.

And that's exactly what Burke said.

Like, you need to have content for everyone.

Of course, I know.

Yeah.

But

Is it made in the US or is it made in Turkey or where do you make these shows?

We have production teams in Turkey, Istanbul, and we have production teams in different countries of Europe, very close to your country, some of them.

I can imagine I would guess Czech Republic and Poland.

Yeah,

very accurate guesses.

We have

production teams in the US as well.

Yeah, but I would still say majority is produced here in Europe because in the US it's going to be like what, like 10 times more expensive.

If I understand for the real short content LA stuff, which is like 300k per one of these 60 to 90 minute series?

It depends.

I think 300 is kind of a bit more on the upper

edge of the upper spectrum.

Yeah, the range, but it can go up to that, of course.

And Real Short, since Real Short is producing like 30, 40, 50 series a month,

they do some of them with higher budgets, some of them with lower budgets.

I'm sorry, I laughed at Genius Baby saves the day, fucking hell.

I mean, they have everything.

Can you go back to drama pops?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So, one of the biggest differences I noticed kind of with Real Short and Drama Pops around ads, which is kind of what I focus on, right?

Do you just want to talk through maybe how you thought about the ads when you built the app and how you kind of wanted to interact with the overall user experience?

Of course.

I can give you guys a brief introduction about the of our ad approach on ads and then let Sefa explain how we use ads on the app in more detail.

So it's actually a very new industry.

It's been two years since short drama apps emerged.

Before that, that it was in china of course but in china you know the app market is not the same with the western markets because they are

well they don't rely on uh in-app purchases that much they

have that micro program thing that it's yeah we chat yeah in

stuff they were in micro programs in wechat so

it's a new

genre, it's a new industry.

So everyone is trying different things.

We're also trying different things as well.

We're using ads as a, well,

as a

chance for our users to see more of the shows

before they have to make a payment or like use the ads to

collect more tickets and watch a full series in a couple of days or weeks, etc.

But Sephi can tell you more in detail about our use of ads in the app.

Actually, from day one, we have traded ads like

a completely voluntary option because

we never put an interstitial in front of a cliffhanger because that would kill the experience actually.

Instead, we offer a value exchange moments that user initiates.

For example, we have two different rewards logic as you can see in the app.

One of them is the extra daily reward tickets.

When the user claims

daily tickets, we offer extra tickets if user watch an ad.

Also, we have seven extra

ad slopes per day and it's resets every day.

User also watch seven ads per day and claim tickets.

We are experimenting alternative like logics methods in different regions, but the

rule is ad must never break immersion.

This is the rule for us.

Of course, we are testing.

I can explain our

rewards logic like that.

Please do.

Yeah, please do.

Super interesting.

Basically,

these,

as you can see, these two rewards logic are we are using.

but we did some testing in different regions but

the

we we know ads has more potential than we are using.

We are actively actually exploring it, but the goal is not cannibalizing inner purchases.

This is the key point for us because there is a balance between administration and inner purchase revenue.

We know our plan is to expand rewarded ads to mid-tail GOS, test post-free content

interstitial, not now, but we are planning in some points,

And also

non-payers who have run out of tickets,

we offer ads, ad logics, different ad logics for these users to continue to watching it.

I can explain like that.

Yeah, also we have that, as Sefa mentioned, that we have that seven-day streak thing.

It's kind of like a gamification of the rewards and it's kind of like a loyalty program that

you check in every every day and you get more and more tickets.

And you can get even more tickets by

watching an ad after you check in.

But it helps us have our users with more retention.

And I can say that our retention rates are pretty high comparing to all the other app categories we've been dealing with in Coldway.

Interesting.

Basically, on Real Short, there's 13 rewarded ad impression opportunities per day.

Is that also kind of where you guys are at in terms of how many rewarded ads a user can watch every day?

Or is it uncapped?

13.

Which one is 13?

The real short has about 13, has exactly 13 rewarded ad placements that you can watch every day.

So there's eight in the store, and then the rest you can watch, or the rest other four you can watch during consuming content to unlock more, but it's capped.

So it's 13 a day.

That's the max limit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We actually have seven on the rewards page, and we also have the ad option after you check in.

So one more is there actually, that makes it eight.

And we're testing

ads

in when

you hit the paywall in the series.

If you don't make a purchase, we are testing an option to make some amount of episodes available with ads as well.

So, epsilon ad, basically, if you hit zero tickets, yeah.

Yeah,

you don't have you have insufficient tickets to unlock the episode, and you close the paywall,

so you see an option to unlock the episode with an ad.

But this is a in testing phase with for us.

Okay, okay,

this screen basically.

Yeah,

when you decide to not purchase a ticket here, you see an option to

if I understand

oh free tickets.

There we go.

Thank you.

Even better.

If I understand the real shock has an upsell there, as Felix said, that if you run out of stuff, they upsell for some time and then again they go into cap.

So I estimate basically the ad revenue for drama pops to be anywhere between 12 to 18 percent right now.

Is that about right, or is that a bit too low?

It's actually a bit too high as an estimation.

But

it might be the case for some of the apps that use the ad monetization more aggressively.

We don't use ad monetizations that aggressive, to be honest, but some of the apps

have been using interstitials, banners,

and more rewarded ads.

So that might be the case for some of the apps, yeah.

By the way, do I get it right?

Because all of the content that I see here is slapped original on top of it, so you're not renting anything, and everything is pretty much made by yourself.

We are, we have been producing our own content, original content, for a while now.

At the beginning, we had some content licensed

in the deeper sections of the app.

Yeah,

yeah, let's call it altered.

Here, here, for instance, let's call it old

I love it.

We're not confident in those content and we don't and we're very confident in our own content.

We promote our own content.

By the way, does it make sense for you to like later after you know the content had some life cycle behind it to rent it out to other apps?

Yeah, that's a very common uh practice for I think most of the apps.

We haven't done it yet, but we're uh we're considering that.

So I guess it's an additional stream of revenue, basically.

Yeah.

And yeah.

Most of the apps do that.

Yeah.

And how do you decide on what content to produce?

Do you ask users or basically do you look at competing apps or do you just look after dramatic themes on TikTok?

Or how do you decide on that?

Actually, a little bit of that, a little bit of that.

You have to follow the trends, of course, in social media, in

web novels, in

interactive stories apps.

So, if there is an emerging trend in an emerging trend trope or something,

you should act fast because the

timeline of producing a new series is

about three months.

So,

yeah, it's not like when you, all right, I'm going to do a vampire doctor story.

You can't do it in a week or so.

So, not gonna be married to a pope any soon.

So, yeah, so we follow the trends,

we have

we try to

have like feedback loops in our data intelligence platforms.

We see where the drop-offs are, we see where the

most retentions are, and we follow the metrics of our marketing campaigns to see which what performs well, what performs not well.

So, that they all contribute to the making stage.

Yeah.

Also I'm like super curious about this because we already seen it here in this like other content that you rented that you said.

Do you make sequential content like you know one if if if it works great then you like recycle it or do s like you know recycle the actors, the stage and everything and make a second sea second part of that series or does it work this way?

Or because I never saw these things ever here.

They usually come in packages and that's it.

And there's like if it's so good, why don't we make like second, third, fourth, fifth movie, whatever.

Yeah, we haven't done it yet.

These two are the ones we have licensed.

We haven't done sequels, but it's also not a very common practice in the short drama market as well, by the way.

Some of our competitors are starting to do that, and we'll see how it goes.

Because since

to be honest, this is of course subjective, but since this is a relatively new industry and the audience base has still a very long way to

broaden,

I think it makes more sense to focus on expansion rather than retention at the moment

by having new and more content for newer audiences.

Okay, and last question regarding the content.

How much

more impactful or how much important do you see the interactive content?

Well, it's an area to explore for us.

because we haven't tried interactive stories yet interactive stories apps were a huge thing a couple years ago and they're still very big

and it can definitely

like feed the uh feed the know-how for producing more content for

the drama series but

I'm sorry you were talking about having interactive series I think not yeah like same as real short because real short like some of some of their episodes, because Real Short and the company has roots within the chapters, interactive novels.

Exactly.

So some of their series, I literally went through those and like you have choices, which adds an additional thing of currency.

So literally,

do you want to buy this?

Like, I'm going to buy, or which dress do you want to buy?

And there's literally choices, like this amazing dress or like this shitty dress for free.

And you literally change a different camera angle, whatever the story takes a little bit of a, I guess it's still linear, so it goes like this.

So you don't really change it but you have the illusion of choice at least and the most important thing for me is that it offers that same monetization point yeah it's a monetization point because it's

the same as interactive stories pretty much the same same part so that's why i'm asking like how much do you think for instance this additional thing provides in overall revenue possibility or like for instance how much soft currency in instead of the tickets people are paying here in in real short or stuff like that if you know any numbers there yeah we're definitely excited to try that and we want to try that at some point it's of course it's a it's a challenge uh not in a technical part but the productionly

well

you have to well there there are two ways you can go one is that you have the options but they don't that much affect the yeah as i said the illusion of choice you just can make better dress but she'll still get you know dumped by the building

like with like how netflix it did it with bandersnatch at some point uh

it was you had different endings with different storylines, so it depends on the you can choose

How you will go in the spectrum, but it's of course a great it's it's exciting to test the monetization part of it because

We have the subscription and we have the in-app consumables

and it's a way to

increase the amount of consumable purchases.

So it's it's a definitely interesting point.

Yeah, because like for me, from for instance, from a game design standpoint, this content seems to be for me much more effective if you if if it would be really robust and fleshed out rather than just illusion of choice, you would actually have choices because it means that it now has replayability.

So that same content would be played by same person and pretty much watch it twice or three times or how many times it it kind of pays off.

Changes to the storyline.

Yeah, he changes to storyline.

So so for instance, like, I don't know, which are two at how much.

Even Cyberpunk had like eight.

Like Witcher 2, like, there's the greatest example.

Midpoint of Witcher 2, you literally choose between going with these guys or that guys, and you never change sides again.

And, like, it's a completely different game from that point on.

So, it's like pays off to replay definitely.

Detroit comes to mind.

Yeah, yeah.

So, there's lots lots of possibilities.

Also, for the content part,

for the newcomers, newcomer users see

like a short story.

We ask what type of dramas they want to see in the app.

Also, this part led us to maybe which content should be, the next content should be, or what our users want to see in the app.

This part is also important for us because

it's what users want to see.

Yeah, that's the preference onboarding where you start the app and you need to literally pick your tag.

So like I'm this, I'm that, there's my demo.

I want to see vampires and werewolves where they are.

There we go.

Vampire CEOs.

Well,

I want to jump in on this because the rumor on the street is that this is also like hit-driven, like any other thing.

If you have a hit creative, it can change dramatically the whole UA landscape.

And apparently, this happens with like a hit content as well.

Like, which of the content you produced were like the biggest hits that showed you, like, oh, oh my god, this is actually working really well?

Yeah, the actually, yeah, the content is since this is a content app,

the content is actually, it determines the ad creatives as well.

That's what I want to ask as well, yeah.

And we

so your question was which series of ours was biggest, yeah, yeah, pretty much.

Yeah, uh, actually, you can kind of guess from the like in order of we

so the trending is the actual

but for example, we have a series called Situationship with my billionaire friend.

There it's in the like fourth or fifth, I think, in the trending.

Yeah, that's the one I watched actually.

Yeah, it was, for example, a huge hit.

It's it's kind of like the uh yeah, it's kind of one of the most uh

hits uh

short dramas of 2025 global globally.

But at some point they get saturated, of course.

It's not they don't last forever.

All of them has a life life cycle, as you mentioned before with the distribution thing.

So we need to keep producing hits in order to stay on top.

But yeah, Situation Ship was a great series and most of the series you see on there with the trending and the hero banner are were big hits.

And I guess it's just a matter of time when then like this hits enough scale that we get to have not no name actors, but C level actors, B level actors and maybe like

at least one series, you know, to have a flagship there.

Yeah, but

the short drama industry, this is kind of an interesting point.

It's not product point of view at all.

This is this won't, maybe your audience will be bored of listening to this, but

the this is a this is an industry in itself.

I mean, there is a

limited and very few amount of production done by Hollywood or the other production

industries in other countries.

It's very limited, very few, and very limited people can work in it.

So, the capacity is limited for these things to be created.

But the short drama industry has created a new world for all the actors, all the crew members, all the directors, everyone to work on

different stuff and

you know both be employed of course and both uh

also to like to have a portfolio have create something because those people are artists some of them they want to create something they want to express themselves through movies and some short dramas of course don't

they are very limiting in it they're very creatively repetitive of themselves but we try to do different tropes unique storylines like more high quality high productional value stuff so it also creates a an opportunity for a lot of new

people to

create something for the world to see so it's basically like entry entry point to acting hollywood whatever you start here maybe an entry point but those people are also very talented i mean if you see the shows

some actors are extremely talented talented, some directors are extremely talented, and they also stand out, of course, as they do good stuff.

And this industry will consolidate at some point, and most people will stand out even more.

So I don't see them actually as like

D-list

people.

They're very talented, to be honest.

And we always try to work with the most talented people.

So we have high confidence they will.

will be.

If you think about it, like if there is

a B or C

or whatever, even let's say Brad Pitt coming into the short drama, it's gonna be just super expensive.

And do you think that would help expand this kind of genre, right?

That's my question because Brett Pitt, the moment he comes and you play just one drama with him, you use him in those creatives.

Because those are But that's that's a different license also, no?

It's just it's not very

black and white.

I mean, I would say that's an extra.

Can I just ask a question here that I'm just begging to ask?

I'm thinking about it.

How much does UA impact your decisions on what content to make?

It affects a lot, yeah,

because

uh, it's everything basically, yeah, yeah.

As I've mentioned, the name of the game is kind of expansion at that point, so

the UA metrics are

I think the most determining effect the success of the yeah, yeah,

one there, Mate?

Wait, wait, wait, yeah, no, I just want to say, like, then, do you actually shoot

some, like, let's say, trial, like, of

do you shoot stuff based on your creatives that you want to achieve?

No, that's why that's like, that's where I'm trying to get, but I'm trying to like formulate the question.

Because then,

if you actually shoot, let's say, 10 different videos, and then from those, let's say, two of them are the best performing, performing, and then from that, you kind of shoot the whole series.

You mean, do you pre-screen the shows by these things?

This is also an open-to-discussion

topic, actually.

There are some companies, some platforms do that.

They call it prototyping or like testing.

They have a story idea.

Okay.

Originally, it should be like 90 minutes or something, but they shoot like 10 minutes of it with

lower budgets, with lower production value just to try it out.

This is, of course, a great way to test the series before investing all that money to produce everything.

But

this is, of course, subjective, and this is just my opinion, and

it's not a fact at all.

I believe it's not a very accurate way to test the show because the show is

an art piece by itself.

For example, I've mentioned Situation Ship,

a series of ours.

It's a very big hit.

But I'm not sure if we have produced it with lower budget, with

10 minutes.

I don't think we would have seen a successful result, and we would just throw the story out because.

But when we, if we, if we have confidence in the story, if we have confidence in the production,

we just decided to do it altogether.

But of course, there are companies that try that, and I'm sure they see some great results and see some like they have they have that in their measuring mechanism as well.

You know, Matthew, what I want to ask:

Freezing families when.

Yes.

Yeah.

Freezing families and AI when.

Because, yeah, Boca, there's the, I'm pretty sure you saw all the creatives from the casual games where you went coming from China as well, where you have basically freezing families to death, and then you combine that with gameplay, and that's just like a trend, which is

like one of the most popular creatives where like

a mother with a daughter gets rejected by husband or dumb from work or whatever,

worst case possible, then she ends up in some random shack without windows, roof, anything.

She's freezing there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's what I was making the joke: like, if you run this series, because it would make a great UA creative.

Yes, yes, those ad creatives are definitely an inspiration source for some of the short girls.

So, yeah,

you're getting inspired by like the best performing gaming trend as well, if I understand.

Yeah, it might.

I mean, we might.

I mean, we haven't, I think, uh,

inspired by any of them so far.

You should, definitely.

You should, you should.

And then we have like the whole separate question

about AI, because

from what we discussed with the different

guys from this genre, like

this is like right now, it's really booming.

But then the next level of all the short dramas is just.

All of this basically made by AI.

Are you experimenting with AI?

Like, how does that fit into your framework at the moment or in the future?

Well, we have experimented

AI-generated footages for UA stuff actually.

We have experimented them for ad creatives.

We haven't used them in series in the app in itself.

But yes, it will definitely happen at some point.

The AI will definitely be capable of producing dramas, producing films, etc

at the moment the technology isn't there yet but it will be

it's very very close i would say if you look into it it's just like we we don't have optimized stuff because currently everybody's chasing just wow effect and nobody's chasing efficiency from the moment we chase efficiency we'll get there

which most probably is going to be very early next year yeah somewhere there uh Mate, you want to take it over with the creators?

You can just open that

tab because I wanted to ask, you have obviously Appla Vin in there, and

the Aplavin is actually quite big on any types of apps,

Pregnant X, and whatever else.

But you have also a few of the playables right there.

If you just exit this and then just open the first one, which yeah, this is the playable.

Other kind of plans with playables, but the real ones, basically where you can kind of simulate the choices that we that we briefly touched on before.

Would you like to say

actually we tried playable creatives

through at lobby?

We kept we keep them simple and story-based.

For example,

in one creative, uh

the character is about to splat someone and user swipes and complete this action.

We tried this uh similar concept,

story-driven

playable

like creatives, but we are still exploring it.

We didn't see a big hit creative yet.

But a plugin has huge potential.

We know it.

We are using it, it's like both playable or not playable creatives.

But we are still trying playable creatives too.

Okay, nice.

Yeah, and

if I get that,

you run a lot of UA on Facebook and I assume TikTok and Google, obviously.

And if you go up a little bit, Jakub, there is eight minutes, six minutes long videos.

And this is not quite new for this genre, and other people are using that as well.

Can you talk about that a little bit more?

Why is this actually working so well, the long form?

Because it's not really that frequent in the gaming industry.

Yeah, because

this is not actually, yeah, because these are films.

That's the short answer, to be honest.

Okay.

We have to have people invested in interest.

So we can do that by showing them a clip of edited one-minute stuff,

or we can do that with like eight minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes

like

footage of the series.

So both work

for

some series.

The short edits work, so for some series,

the longer footages work.

So the thing is, you know how the monetization part of the short demo works.

You show people

a certain amount of free episodes and then you hit them with the paywall.

So it's kind of like that experience, but before downloading the app.

So if we can have like 10 minutes of the show in the creative and have people watch them and then they get invested in it and then they can just download the app and then make the payments.

So you're basically pre-qualifying the users with

it, of course, it results in higher CPI, but it results in higher

conversion rates as well.

Yeah, so yeah, that's what I wanted to get into that.

Like you basically show eight eight minute long video and people are like, oh my god, this is so long.

But then they actually started watching those videos and say, oh,

actually, this is pretty good.

I want to know more.

I want to watch more.

And then as soon as they get into the app, they're already pre-qualified as a high intent or like high-quality users because they already watched like seven minutes of

it's the typical unfinished business effect because they want to finish that story that they started watching that that's the part of it that's right exactly you got them hooked at some point yeah it's an unfinished business you have they have to see what will happen next.

Yeah, anyway,

I get that right story that the playables are basically about you choosing a story because

one of those loads for me, I guess, this other one won't, but it's basically you screaming through a catalog, and the moment the user finds the story he wants, he clicks it, and you then you play it from the playable.

Yeah, we tried that as well.

We tried one as Sefa mentioned,

like she's about to slap someone, and then you tap on slap or swipe her

interactive format.

We try different things, but yeah.

And I love this series, like it's uh, it's it's amazing.

So, but then the best performing again, best performing channels are, I guess, the main ones: Facebook, TikTok, and then what Google.

Are you expanding to anything,

let's say, not

conventional outside of the UA, like while working with any types of influencers, small ones on YouTube, TikTok, wherever?

Well, not very unconventional, but I think we're using App Lovin more than some of our competitors.

Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely.

So

I can mention that because, yeah, App Lovin is a great network for us,

but nothing very extraordinary other than that.

Okay.

Are you currently mediating on Max as well, or are you on another mediation?

Other.

Okay.

Interesting.

Well, what if you actually go to Mags and then you can use actually the blend campaigns?

That could be an interesting how about the ad revenue is below 12%, right?

So, I don't know if it would help that much.

That's true, yeah.

Fair enough.

So, I guess you are actually listening to me, Felix.

That's good.

12 minutes, well, yeah, yeah, that's good.

How about TikTok?

I mean,

this basically

creates

a movie, very TikTok-y.

Yeah.

Well uh you can mention the b difference between uh Facebook and TikTok if you want to.

Yeah, please.

Please do.

Uh depends on different

like seasonality, regional trends, uh creative freshness or creative saturation.

It depends on uh feed factor.

Uh we can't say uh winner uh per like ch in Netsburg UA channel uh for drum pops, but it can

we see like promising numbers in TikTok

like sometimes, but we use uploading more than the competitor.

We saw a potential over there, but our reliable skill engine is Facebook, I think.

Yeah, it's fair.

But I can add that

it really depends on the content.

So you you mentioned that the series are TikToky, but to be honest,

the audience is much older than what you imagine to be.

Everyone thinks, like, all right, this is for Gen Z, but it's not actually,

it's mostly for, like, yeah, as you can see, it's for about 35 years

female audience.

So,

for some series, for example, the Situation Ship series, it was very, it was, it was a unique storyline.

It attracted people from all ages and it worked wonders in TikTok, in Meta, in Apple, and it worked everywhere.

But some of the series, some of the more conventional short dramas, not conventional comparing to traditional TV, but conventional comparing to other China-based short dramas,

I can say.

Since they already have a base audience for short drama, and when you create something that will that will that's appealing

for that audience,

you can

use that

momentum.

But when you create a unique storyline, it works on TikTok, it works on Facebook.

TikTok has that more violability effect,

and

it can be like it can go to the it can go skyrocket instantly.

And Facebook has that stability effect as well.

So both are great networks for us.

I think here the

creatives are too polished for TikTok.

If I think about it, it's like more high quality.

If you just take an iPhone and then just shoot something from your iPhone as a drama kind of series, that would definitely work better on TikTok as a creative rather than just

yeah, that's right.

And

our series has even more higher productional value, so it's

even more polished comparing to other short dramas as well.

But as I said, that depends on the series, to be honest, because some of the series we produce are

aimed to be short drama.

So

they do work as how other competitors' creators work.

Any plans to expand the UA channels?

For example, I saw Mintegral doing quite well in the app business as well.

And if you're not mediating with Max, then I guess the

other UA channel, which is there, like a unit or iron source?

Sorry, I couldn't get the last part.

If you are trying to expand or will be expanding the UA channel mix to Mintegraph, for example, or to Unity or Iron Source at the at some point in the future.

Yeah, we have uh we haven't had like too many tries for other networks, I think.

Okay,

yeah, of course, it's definitely an option.

We should discuss that with the marketing team as well.

But yeah, of course, I know.

We only tried like a few channels, but we

But

at some point, we will definitely try.

Nice.

Okay, good.

That's

all

I had for the UA part, because this, I mean,

the number of creatives you have, I mean, it matches the number of stories you have as well.

And it's

throwing cake creative works pretty well.

It does, yeah.

Of course, that's what everybody wants to see.

You have a good eye, my friend.

Yeah, good.

Yeah, is there anything else you'd like to add that we think we missed in covering drama pops?

Well, nothing big, to be honest, but we're excited to see how this short drama industry

how it will resolve in the future, what will happen to like there are at the moment like more than fifty apps.

That is definitely too much for that kind of a content we're curious to see how it will like how what kind of a consolidation will happen in the future how this will evolve to like have broader audiences we're of course trying out different things to expand our audience to different demographics, to different ages, different geographic expansions.

We're trying different things.

But we're very curious and we're very excited to see where this will go.

And we are very very confident that drama pops will be here for the long haul as with anything we do at codeway you guys know uh already that we're

we've seen the chart looks great yeah

thank you thank you we're always confident in what we do and we're confident for drama pops as well My prediction for this, like looking at it and like hearing to and learning some things from you, like thanks for that, like very enlightening, is that I think at some point, as you said, people will start to shift a little bit from expansion to consolidation and keeping the users there.

So we're going to see more experimental and SQL content probably.

That's one thing, more interactivity, more spend and more optimization.

So we mean we need choices or more gamification.

And the other thing, which is a big elephant in the room, which I think will happen, even though they're just doing one stupid decision after the other, is Netflix or some other kind of big streaming competitor that's going to look at this category and finally maybe do some stuff with their IPs or maybe license them.

I don't don't know.

I think they're still thinking this is too small for them.

Throwing 3 billion out of the window into complete minus is a great way to think this is good for them.

No, but

this is the content, the type of the content is, I think, too cheesy for Netflix, yet.

Yeah.

I'm not saying like this would be on Netflix.

What I'm saying is that Netflix buying one of these apps or creating their own

Netflix spin-off basically.

But they still have the opportunity to jump in, and I'm pretty pretty sure the bigger OTT platforms will jump in the the bandwagon.

The type of the content, the content is evolving.

It's evolving into more serious series since more like Western culture companies are also entering the market.

Like we've been doing this for one year and some companies from US, some companies from Germany, France, Ukraine are doing this.

So it will evolve into something that I think may interest bigger streaming platforms more in the near future.

So I'm pretty sure we're going to see some developments for that as well.

And Safa, you wanted to say something before we went on this little tangent.

I wanted to add a few things.

As a Cold Way, we have really good know-how about both product and marketing side.

We name Cold Way of doing things for that.

We have a huge advantage when

compared to our competitors.

Also, we are learning in the production side really fast.

So I can say that we have a really good advantage of being like Coldway

app

when we compare to our competitors.

I think we will see really good numbers, really good things in the near future.

We're confident.

Yeah,

we're already seeing that.

And if you can grow even more,

yeah, heads off, guys.

I mean,

doing pretty good stuff.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

Also, guys, thank you very much for coming.

This was really, really good episode.

Also, listeners, thank you very much for listening as well.

And please keep subscribing.

Please join the Slack channel.

We'll put the guys in the show notes if you want to reach out to them.

And yeah, thank you very much.

See you next time.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.