Original Summary

We’re a five-person team based in LA, and one of our short dramas did a little over $120k in gross viewer revenue during its first month on FlexTV. Before anyone gets too excited, that is definitely not $120k sitting in our bank account lol. I want to introduce this industry to everyone and also find anyone we can connect! And also some tips & experience that I could share. The first few episodes are free, then viewers either buy coins or subscribe to keep watching. The platform takes its share, and we still have production, localization and advertising costs. The revenue screenshot always looks much nicer than the final profit. We spent around $45k producing roughly 60 episodes. We shot everything in LA but outsourced some of the editing, subtitles and localization to a team in China. For other language versions, we also hired voice actors in different countries instead of trying to do everything locally. Honestly, production was the more predictable part. The first thing we learned was that the story needs to get moving almost immediately. You don’t have five episodes to introduce everyone. Something needs to happen in the first few seconds, and pretty much every episode needs to end right when the viewer wants an answer. Subtle storytelling is great. This is not really the place for it 😂 The part we underestimated was advertising. We spent another $35k testing different clips and hooks on Meta and TikTok during the first month. Most of them went nowhere. A handful of creatives brought in almost all the paying viewers. And a better drama doesn’t always mean better results. Sometimes the most ridiculous 20-second clip is the one that gets people into the app. Another mistake is thinking you can ”save” a drama by spending more on ads. Before launching, you really need to decide how much you’re willing to test and when you’re going to stop. If it costs more to acquire a paying viewer than that person actually spends, scaling just helps you lose money faster. Paying everyone was also more annoying than expected. We originally found our first overseas editor through Upwork. Once we had worked together for a while and built some trust, he introduced us to a few other editors, translators and voice teams in his network in China. And they could take the payments after a project ends, so we use photon pay to keep those overseas payments in one place and issue separate virtual cards for some of our ad accounts. Outsourcing turned out to be one of the best decisions we made for controlling the budget, but only after we found people we could actually trust. I haven’t seen many people here discuss the business side of this industry here, even though the market is growing incredibly fast!!! Our next step is experimenting with AI-generated vertical dramas. Still very early, but I’d be curious to hear from anyone else working in or seriously researching this space! :)   submitted by   /u/ThatOneBandNerd [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · Entrepreneur
  • 发布时间：2026/9/21 09:49:17