ReelShort's longest App Store ad has stayed live 319 days. That is the longest-running short-drama ad in the whole category we tracked, and it was still live when our window closed. An advertiser does not fund one line of copy for over ten months by accident. It does that because the copy pays.
We pulled this from Apple's public Ad Repository, which discloses the ads an advertiser runs in the EU. Data window ending 10 July 2026, covering Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Great Britain. ReelShort is the category leader in short-form vertical drama, the apps built around minute-long episodes you swipe through. Here is what its public ad footprint shows, and what a solo founder can copy from it.
A 319-day survivor at the top
ReelShort's surviving set is eight distinct creatives. The oldest of them has run 319 days and was still live in the window. To put that in the category: the next longest belongs to DramaWave at 249 days, then DramaBox at 172, NetShort at 151 and GoodShort at 99. ReelShort holds the longest ad in the field by seventy days.
Longevity is a proxy here, not a measured conversion rate. We cannot see ReelShort's installs or its cost per download. What we can see is what it keeps paying for. When the category leader lets one creative ride for 319 days while rivals top out at half that, the read is simple: it found a promise it trusts, and it is not touching it. For a founder studying the leader, the lesson is not a clever concept. The category-winning ad is a plain value promise sitting in search results.
Every ad in one placement
Now the part that changes how you spend. All of ReelShort's ads run in a single placement: App Store search results, the slot that shows after someone types a query. There are no browse buys, no Today-tab placements, nothing aimed at people scrolling the store with no app in mind. One hundred percent search.
That is a choice, and a deliberate one. ReelShort is not paying to interrupt browsers. It is paying to reach people who already typed something, people with intent in the moment. Search is where a query becomes a download, and ReelShort put its whole budget there.
For a small competitor this is the cheapest lesson in the teardown. You do not need the leader's budget to copy its placement logic. Start where intent is highest. Buy the search slot for the terms your app answers, and skip the browse placements until you have a proven ad and money to widen. The leader spends only on intent. So can you, on day one, with a fraction of the spend.
A different promise per country
Look at what ReelShort writes in its search-results headline, market by market:
- Germany: "Kurzserien nonstop genießen" (enjoy short series nonstop)
- France: "Mini-séries à tout moment !" (mini-series anytime)
- Spain: "Shorts Sin Límites" (shorts without limits)
- Italy: "Unlimited Shorts on the Go"
Read those four again. Nonstop. Anytime. Without limits. On the go. That is not one sentence run through a translator. It is a different promise built for each market. Germany gets nonstop, France gets anytime, Spain gets no limits, Italy gets the on-the-go framing. Same product, four angles.
This matters because the lazy version, write one headline and translate it everywhere, is what most apps do. It reads like a translation, because it is one. ReelShort localizes the promise instead of the words, and it is a concrete tactic you can copy without a bigger budget. Pick the hook that lands in each country. A line that sounds native to a German user is not the same line that sounds native to a Spanish one, even when the app is identical.
What to test first if you build in this category
If you are one person building or competing with a short-drama app, ReelShort's public data hands you a starting order.
Test the placement first. Put your budget in App Store search results before anything else. That is where the leader spends all of it, and it is where a typed query is closest to a download. You can copy this on any budget.
Test a plain promise second, not a clever one. The ad the leader has funded for 319 days is a value promise, not a concept. Write the plainest version of what your app gives someone, and run it long enough to see if it holds.
Test per-market headlines third. Do not translate one line across your markets. Write the promise that fits each country the way ReelShort did, then let longevity tell you which one to keep funding.
See any app's ads yourself
You can read ReelShort's live EU creatives, or any app's, the same way we just did. See any app's ads at recao.app, free, no account, in about a minute. You get the advertiser's live App Store ads ranked by how long each has run, so the survivors sit at the top.
Method note: every figure here comes from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), for the data window ending 10 July 2026, covering the EU storefronts of Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Great Britain. Days running measures the span from a creative's first to its last recorded impression. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate: advertisers tend to keep paying only for ads that work. We invented no numbers; if a figure is not in Apple's disclosure, it is not in this piece.