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My Drama & HOLYWATER

The Ukrainian up-start teaching vertical-drama giants a new release game

Real Reel™

23 Jul 2025 — 3 min read

Who is HOLYWATER and what is My Drama?

Kyiv-based HOLYWATER began as a romance-reading start-up (My Passion), then pivoted to video in April 2024 with the launch of My Drama, a portrait-only streaming app. Four months later TechCrunch reported the service had 1 million users and US $3 million in revenue. By March 2025, a Forbes profile put monthly active users at 20 million and monthly turnover at €12 million (≈ US $13 million). Across all products HOLYWATER’s annual recurring revenue now tops US $70 million, with My Drama contributing ≈ 45 %.

The marathon roll-out no one else dared try

The surge is remarkable not just for its speed but for the way it defies the prevailing playbook of vertical drama. Rivals such as California-based ReelShort and Singapore’s DramaBox flood TikTok with wave after wave of 60-second cliff-hangers, launching as many as ten new soap-opera series in a single month. My Drama, by contrast, prefers a marathon: the company debuts only three shows a month and allows a single flagship to dominate marketing for a full six or seven weeks.

That strategy was on full display with Spark Me Tenderly, the 2025 melodrama that married secret-identity romance to the life-or-death urgency of a mother’s hospital bill. HOLYWATER’s writers cut every ninety-second episode to contain at least one moment that could stand alone as an ad: “Kiss me now or fire my mother’s doctor” is already a TikTok meme; but the studio did not rush to the next project once viewers bit. Instead, its user-acquisition team kept recycling new teasers from the same footage, trimming paid-traffic costs while the series climbed the in-app charts.

The approach appears to work. TechCrunch’s launch-week scoop counted one million installs and three million dollars in gross sales by September 2024. Internal data seen by venture site Tech.eu suggest cumulative views across the catalogue have since passed 560 million and that new downloads still average around 60,000 a week. Analysts who track Sensor Tower data say a typical My Drama flagship pays back its ad spend by the fifth week; everything after that is profit.

Why draw the roll-out so long?

Part of the answer lies in costs. Industry trackers peg the cost per install (CPI) between $1.50 and $4.00 for short-drama apps in North America and Western Europe. By stretching a single series over multiple ad flights, HOLYWATER amortises that outlay instead of restarting the meter every fortnight as ReelShort often must.

Then there is retention. Last winter HOLYWATER added an AI layer called My Muse that lets fans chat with the hero or villain while they wait for the next cliff-hanger. The gimmick keeps daily engagement high and, company executives say, lifts the lifetime value (LTV) of each viewer enough to justify the leisurely release.

Quality helps, too. Whereas many American-made vertical soaps film on Los Angeles soundstages, My Drama shoots in and around Kyiv, dressing local mansions to read as Manhattan penthouses. The euro-light production price, estimated $80,000 to $120,000 per finished hour, buys more visual polish than viewers expect from a phone app, a point tech bloggers routinely note when ranking newcomers against incumbents such as GoodShort.

HOLYWATER bets that depth will outlast speed. Each drama is conceived as an IP seed: once the video run ends, the story moves to the company’s original product, the e-novel app My Passion, and may return as a sequel if both funnels make money. The result is an integrated loop that keeps one title alive for months and reduces the need to feed the algorithm with ever-new content.

Whether the Kyiv model scales beyond romance remains to be seen. For now, though, HOLYWATER has given the vertical-drama gold rush its first serious alternative: sprint if you like, but know that a steady marathoner is closing the gap, one recycled teaser at a time.