Holywater Tech's pocket TV playbook
I've been publicly skeptical about micro drama. Then we put the founder of My Drama on stage.
"The retention of our audience is about two times higher with subscription versus in-app purchases."
Bogdan Nesvit, Founder, Holywater Tech and My Drama
If you follow me, you know where I stand on micro drama. I published my skepticism in full: the unit economics, the content fatigue, the 200-plus apps fighting over the same audience with rising acquisition costs. I wasn’t convinced the hype matched the business.
So when Bogdan Nesvit, founder of Holywater Tech and My Drama, sat down with Evan Shapiro and me live at StreamTV Europe, I went in with specific doubts. Some of what he said confirmed what I expected, some of it didn’t.
Holywater Tech is 6 years old and turns out to be built differently from the players I pulled apart in my prediction. The pipeline runs from a books platform with over a million monthly users, through an AI production engine that generates a series in 2 weeks, into My Drama, the live action platform at close to 7 million monthly active users. 90+ percent of those users are now on subscription. Nesvit shares why that’s more profitable than micro transactions. This the part where I can say: told YA! Of course the business model of micro transactions isn’t sustainable and is really just viewers being hooked like gamblers on slot machines.
The Fox Entertainment partnership comes up and it's doing two things at once. Fox wants access to the audience data and the social distribution machine. Holywater Tech wants the genre credibility, the talent relationships and Fox's ad sales infrastructure. Nesvit is direct about why ad monetisation matters: subscription captures one audience segment, ads open the door to everyone else. Right now, micro drama runs on 5 recycled tropes and Nesvit knows it. Getting it to mainstream means testing thriller, detective, sports, fantasy, all the formats that haven’t been proven yet in vertical.
Nesvit finally lays out where this goes next. It's further from vertical video than you'd expect.
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