ReelShort and DramaBox now face a free rival that buys its audience inside TikTok and draws stories from ByteDance's Tomato Novel library, while both still pay third-party channels for users.
ByteDance’s overseas short-drama app PineDrama is run by a team inside TikTok’s business, separate from the group that built Hongguo, ByteDance’s free short-drama platform in China, and it has entered the top 10 of the free iPhone app charts in the US, Brazil and Thailand. TechNode reported the details on October 23, crediting Jiemian News. Tech site CNMO carried the same account that morning, citing third-party data: US downloads have risen since May and have stayed roughly inside the free chart’s top 10 for the past two months.
The organizational detail explains the ranking. CNMO says PineDrama acquires users by advertising on TikTok, while ReelShort and DramaBox, the established players, generally buy traffic through third-party channels. Viewers log in with a TikTok account. PineDrama earns its money from advertising, as Hongguo does at home, while its two largest rivals let viewers watch a few episodes free and then charge to unlock the rest.
How much money the free model makes is still unknown. Neither report includes a comment from ByteDance or TikTok, no revenue figure for PineDrama has been published, and the most specific detail about its content supply comes from a single producer quoted by TechNode.
PineDrama passed 100 million downloads in about nine months
TechCrunch reported on January 16 that TikTok had quietly released PineDrama in the US and Brazil as a free app with no ads, offering episodes of roughly one minute. Growth since then has been fast. Citing Sensor Tower, Jiemian News reported on October 12 that the app had passed 100 million cumulative downloads about nine months after launch, with around 7 million daily active users and more than 17 million new users a month as of September. Of the seven standalone short-drama apps with more than 100 million global downloads, it was the only one less than a year old.
The money is concentrated elsewhere. Mydrivers reported that US users command higher ad prices and generate nearly half of the platform’s revenue. An analysis by Hefan Finance, republished by 36Kr, also put the US at close to half of estimated revenue, with Brazil the largest source of downloads. It said advertisers can buy placements in PineDrama through TikTok Ads Manager in six markets: the US, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand.
Chinese producers and ByteDance’s fiction library supply the shows
According to TechNode, most of PineDrama’s producers currently come from China, and many have worked on Hongguo, Douyin or TikTok. CNMO said the platform is also recruiting local producers abroad and negotiating for original overseas scripts. Producers can license titles from the platform’s content library or distribute their own scripts, and a tiered licensing system lets a promising title move up to premium IP.
ByteDance’s own catalog sits underneath much of this. One producer told TechNode that about 70% to 80% of the stories behind its AI-generated animated dramas come from Tomato Novel, ByteDance’s online fiction platform. CNMO, without giving a share, said some producers license works from Tomato Novel’s copyright library and turn them into AI comic dramas. Hefan Finance reviewed PineDrama’s US top 100 on October 12 and found that most titles showed AI-generated, realistic human footage, though the episode pages carried no consistent label for how they were made. Fifty of the 100 carried a "High society" tag.
Producers gave TechNode two reasons for heading abroad: computing power takes a significant share of AI-drama production costs in China, and paid traffic there is expensive. Some said overseas revenue sharing can pay better, though TechNode cautioned that individual producers’ figures do not describe the industry. ByteDance itself recently disputed a widely repeated claim about how much compute AI dramas consume, saying video uses about 10% of its own.
ReelShort still matches PineDrama across Latin America
The download lead is narrower than the chart positions suggest. Hefan Finance, citing AppMagic data via Mobile Time, counted about 6.3 million July downloads for PineDrama across nine Latin American markets, against about 6.41 million for ReelShort; Brazil alone accounted for roughly 87% of PineDrama’s total. Mydrivers said Indonesia and Brazil together supply more than 80% of its downloads.
TechNode framed the test as whether PineDrama can keep producing hits and build an overseas supply chain and revenue model that lasts beyond the download surge. The figure to watch is US revenue: the first published Sensor Tower or AppMagic estimate of PineDrama’s ad income will show whether a free app fed by TikTok’s traffic can earn as much per viewer as ReelShort’s pay-per-episode model.