Chapter 1 looks at 1 ads, chapter 23 at 23: how a company behind a "ball sort" game sells werewolf novels
What it is A reading app for English-language werewolf and CEO-romance web novels. Chapters unlock via escalating rewarded ads, a 8-hour wait, or by buying coins.
Why it's hot Game studios are bringing rewarded-video-plus-IAP monetization to web fiction: readers get hooked by "story clip" ads inside the game, the book is only readable here, and once they're hooked they pay. Around July, iOS was estimated at roughly $75k/month, but installs have kept slowing and the ranking is sliding.
CHow to play it Stop chasing the crowded English Werewolf market. Teams with paid acquisition and ad-monetization skills can port this "escalating ads (with a cap) + timed + coins" model to languages or themes that aren't saturated yet, using story-clip ads to acquire players within game traffic.
- Data (updated daily) · first launch 2026-09-22 · 11-07 installs 160,265
Android · Total installs worldwide Data 2026-10-29 → 2026-11-07 (10 days, 10 observations). Google's detail page only refreshes install counts every other day, so a flat day doesn't mean nobody installed.Android · Ratings count (cumulative) Data 2026-10-29 → 2026-11-07 (10 days, 10 observations)
RedChapters is an English werewolf and CEO-romance web fiction app with 160k installs on Google Play and 4,838 ratings on the US App Store. Its books carry no author credit and are nearly impossible to find off-app. It unlocks chapters with a mechanic borrowed straight from casual games: the further you read, the more ads you have to watch. Its publisher, HM Games, also has Ball Sort Puzzle, with 100M installs. This piece breaks down how the money comes in, where the readers come from, why it's already on the way down, and what you can take from it.
A reader who stopped at chapter 23
In Aug 2026 21, a US reader gave RedChapters a 1-star review on the App Store titled "Greedy App":
There's at least one good book in this app, and I'm reading it. But every chapter I read brings another ad. Right now I'm watching 23 ads to read 1 very short chapters.
She's not an outlier. Over the past few months, more than half the reviews for this App on the App Store describe the same thing: in June, someone "quit at chapter 5"; in July, someone reached chapter 15 and had to watch 6 ads; in October, someone wrote "now it says I need to watch 11 ads." Another reader in Jun 23 was more specific: she was reading *The Bastard Heir* and said she was "really hooked," so she stopped watching ads and just spent $19.99 on coins, only to find she "had no idea how much of the book was left, only that the ending was still far away."
That's exactly what this app is built to do: the ad ladder isn't meant to keep you watching. It's meant to make you pay once a chapter gets too much to bear.
What it is
An English web-novel reading app built around two genres: werewolves (Alphas, Lunas, packs, cursed bloodlines) and billionaire romance (contract marriages, cold CEOs, "my sister stole my husband"). Titles look like The Cursed Blood, My Sister Stole My Husband, The Spare They Came Begging For, The Seventh Time. Each book runs hundreds of chapters, the longest 428 chapters. Since October it has also added "Interactive Choose" choice-driven stories.
The first chapters are free. After that, there are three ways to keep reading:
| Approach | How to unlock |
|---|---|
| Free | Chapters 5–6 |
| Watch ads | Chapter n requires watching n rewarded videos, and the requirement keeps climbing. Readers have reported 18, 23, and 41 videos |
| Wait | Auto-publishes a new chapter every 8 hours |
| Pay | Each chapter costs 30 coins, coin packs run $0.49 to $99.99 |
One reader on Reddit worked it out: for the 428 chapters of The Cursed Blood, another $49 to finish. Another wrote on the App Store that reading 1 books cost 40 dollars.
The developer, HM Games L.L.C-FZ, is registered in the UAE and calls itself a "casual puzzle game publisher." Its portfolio has a dozen-odd small games: Ball Sort Puzzle (100M+ installs on Google Play), Solitaire Stack Sort, Hole Jam and more. The related company HM Games Pty Ltd is in Australia, and its LinkedIn page is in Vietnam. This is not a web novel company. It's a game company.
Money: more than it looks, but trending down
The revenue numbers you can see from outside are all estimates, and they vary widely:
- Appfigures CEO Ariel Michaeli posted a table on LinkedIn in July 29: "Of the book apps launched in the past 8 months, 7 are already making over $20k a month." RedChapters ranked #2, with iOS monthly revenue of about $75k, and it had only been live for 2 months. Only NovelSlayer ($110k) was ahead of it.
- AppGoblin estimates Android monthly revenue under $10k, with 53% from in-app purchases and 47% from ads. paywallscreens estimates iOS at about $5,000 a month.
These figures don't share a time frame or a method. The reasonable reading: around July it was earning tens of thousands of dollars a month on iOS, and it has been declining since (inference). The charts show the same trend. On the US Google Play Books Top Grossing chart, it was #10-29 118 and #11-06 147. On 10-29 it was charted in 18 country category charts; by 11-06 only 5 remained (US, HK, India, Turkey, Singapore), all near the bottom of Top Grossing.
Installs are flatter. On Google Play, cumulative installs went from 11-06 to 160,265,7 in 2,252 days. Going back (third-party estimates): 9 it had 109k, 130 August 150k, early October 8k. Mid-July it was adding over a thousand a day, from 160 to September three or four hundred, and now two or three hundred. No stretch shows acceleration. 150k installs can still get you on the Top Grossing chart, which means each reader pays a lot, and the bar for US Books Top Grossing is low anyway.
A comment under that LinkedIn post put it bluntly: "RedChapters' reviews are about rising ad requirements per chapter and paying after chapter 5. That's not new packaging. It's the 'watch an ad or pay' model mobile games have used for years. Book apps are catching up on game monetization."
Same book catalog, third brand
The Google Play listing shows a release date of 2026-09-22, yet it already had 100k installs in July. The reason: this package isn't new.
| Brand | Timeline | Status |
|---|---|---|
| RedChapters gen 1 | Launched on iOS early 2025, on Play 2025-06 | Only 207 downloads on Play, 2026-04-23 delisted; gone from iOS too |
| Fantales | Mid-2025 | 49k+ downloads, reviews mostly 1–2 stars (too many ads, stopped updating), now delisted |
| RedChapters gen 2 | iOS 2026-05-01 | The current one |
Readers pieced the timeline together themselves. In April 2026 18, someone on r/RomanceNovelHub wrote: "I read Cursed Blood on RedChapters on Play. This app replaced Fantales, which somehow got pulled." The next day on r/NovelsRequest someone said: "Several apps with different names, including Fantales and Red Chapters, carry the same anonymous-author werewolf stories." On the App Store, in September 4, a reader said she stopped at chapter 196 of The Branded Queen, waited six months, then found the app she had was "outdated" and had to download a new one. In June 1, another said five books she had paid for disappeared from the app: "Why is there another version of the same app?"
Swap the package, swap the entity, relist, and the library and readers move with it. This is one of the main sources of the 100k+ installs it had by July (inference; no data breaks down how early installs were acquired).
How readers get hooked
The clearest path, which readers have described many times:
- While playing a mobile game, you see a "story excerpt" ad: a heartbreaking opening that stops at the worst moment.
- Google the book title. The r/NovelsRequest thread on "the cursed blood novel" has 126 comments, and the poster's first line is "I watched an ad and…". A r/FindThatNovel thread looking for The Bastard Heir also has someone saying "I saw it in an ad too."
- Search results only show RedChapters. The books are unsigned or under pen names like "T. A. Novels", so there's no full text off-platform.
- Ask Reddit for a free link, find none, and download the app.
From April to September 2026, at least 7 threads like this appeared across r/NovelsRequest, r/Findfreenovellinks, r/FindThatNovel and r/novelslovers, the biggest with 308 comments. These threads weren't made by the company, but they became the first result the next reader sees when searching a book title on Google.
Whether the ads are HM Games cross-promoting its own games or buys from networks like AppLovin and Unity can't be seen from outside (unverified). It works with 14 ad networks, 3 mediation platforms and 4 attribution SDKs (AppGoblin), which is standard for a game company. Nothing about it turns up on TikTok, nobody discusses it on X, and no media has covered it.
The store listing also targets people searching by title. The subtitle is "Billionaire & Werewolf Romance," and the description lists titles directly: My Sister Stole My Husband, The Cursed Blood, Blood Deep.
Where the books come from, and why they're not findable off-platform
Reader opinion is split. Some say "well written, not the usual werewolf book," but more complain about repetition, drag, and short chapters ("two long paragraphs a chapter"). In July 23 one reader wrote: "All the stories are AI-written, the AI traces are everywhere." In October 12 another said every story is about a doormat heroine whose sister or best friend steals her husband. Every few chapters the app pops up asking whether the "grammar and syntax meet your expectations," which looks like feedback collection on generated or rewritten text. Some Reddit users also say The Cursed Blood is nearly a rewrite of Game of Destiny, a popular book on AnyStories.
These are readers' claims. AI writing and rewriting have not been verified. But "only available here" is the premise of its whole conversion funnel. One reader says the company has had free sites hosting its books taken down (unverified). The books are also being taken elsewhere: a Reddit user says The Bastard Heir appears on Noel Novel under the title Hood Walking Away, free to read.
One more thing to note: the iOS US rating is 4.67 stars, but recent App Store written reviews are mostly 1–2 stars, and in October someone wrote outright, "The 4.7 stars is fake, 99% of reviews are one or two stars like mine." On Google Play, the 1-star count went from 12 to 29 and back to 27, while the 2-star count went from 6 to 0. That looks like cleanup (cause unverified).
Who it's competing with
English web-novel apps are one of the most crowded categories. 11-06 In the US Google Play Books Top Grossing chart's top 150, about 70 are web-novel apps.
| Competitors | Scale (cumulative Google Play installs, 11-06) | How it differs |
|---|---|---|
| Dreame | 41.5M, Books Top Grossing #6 | Werewolf leader, licensed library and author community |
| GoodNovel | 38.9M, Top Grossing #4 | Signed, credited authors, paid acquisition orders of magnitude larger |
| WebNovel (China Literature) | 32.3M, Top Grossing #7 | Big company, translated web novels plus original platform |
| NovelFlow | 2.33M, Top Grossing #36 | Also ad-unlock, but without escalating gates. Readers treat it as the "fully free" benchmark. |
| AlphaNovel | 2.22M, Top Grossing #23 | Also werewolf-focused, credited authors, coins only |
| AnyStories | 880k, +7k in 32 days, Top Grossing #42 | Has the original Game of Destiny |
| MoonLit / WolfFiction / LycanFiction | 20–480k | Same genre, same model, almost no difference |
| New accounts like VelloraNovel and CrownNovel | 5k–9k, launched in September | New reskins show up every week |
Apps on Appfigures' table like NovelSlayer, Funovel, NovelStory, NovellTale and MeRead also launched in the past 8 months and are over $20k a month. Newcomers can still make money, but more and more people are squeezing in.
If it were you
Verdict: C. Copying RedChapters isn't worth it. The category has seventy similar apps, its own installs and rankings are falling, and readers are angry about the very mechanic that earns it the most. What you can take is one move: apply the casual-game trio of rewarded video ads with escalating depth, timed waits and in-app purchases to any content sold by chapter or level, so you capture both ad and purchase revenue.
Good fit for: Teams already making casual games or tool portfolios, with an ad monetization stack and paid acquisition experience, ideally with a large game audience for cross-promotion. For them, a content app is their existing capability in a new category.
Bad fit for: Indie devs without a paid acquisition budget or content source. These apps depend on ads to bring in users, and the books are both cost and moat. If you rely on mass AI writing or rewriting other people's hit books, the copyright and takedown risk is yours.
How to do it (if you do): Stop competing in English werewolf romance. Look for genres or languages not yet saturated by seventy apps: romance in Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian or German, or English genres beyond werewolves and CEO romance. Don't copy the endless escalation. Copy NovelFlow's approach of capping it (a reader said: "most other apps cap at around 3 entries"), remove the main cause of bad reviews, and use time waits and coins to retain the people who got stuck. Make the content credited and licensable. Don't rely entirely on "nobody can find it off-platform."
How to acquire users: Follow its playbook: run 15–30 second "story excerpt" rewarded video ads inside casual game traffic, with book titles as searchable hooks. Include the title and genre keywords in the store listing and description. Reddit book-request threads will grow organically; you don't need to seed them.
Is now the time: No rush. This category has people entering and leaving all the time. It isn't a window measured in weeks. If you're doing it, test your first ad creatives before the holiday-to-New-Year reading peak.
What would show this read is wrong: ① RedChapters returns under another brand, or the current version climbs back into the US Books Top Grossing top 100. That would mean the ceiling of "relaunch + escalating ads" is higher than estimated, so C underrates it. ② It gets taken down before year end, or the original authors widely complain. That would mean the content supply can't hold, and only the monetization half is worth learning. ③ Charts like Appfigures' show more web novel apps launching in the first half of 2027 and passing $20k a month. That would mean newcomers can still get in, worth recalculating for teams with paid acquisition ability.
Data and sources
- Installs, ratings, charts: Google Play install counts and country category charts, 2026-10-29 to 11-06; installs from 7 to October are third-party (AppstoreSpy) estimates. iOS ratings: App Store, 11-06.
- Revenue estimates: Appfigures (Ariel Michaeli LinkedIn, 2026-07-29), AppGoblin, paywallscreens. All estimates, useful for order of magnitude only.
- User reviews: US App Store reviews (5 to October); Reddit r/NovelsRequest, r/RomanceNovelHub, r/Findfreenovellinks, r/FindThatNovel, r/SpicyRomanceBooks, r/novelslovers.
- Earlier removals: chrome-stats, AppGoblin, MWM; version and campaign timeline: AppInsider.
- Places marked "est.", "inferred", or "unverified" are estimates and inferences.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one GoodNovel Android 2020 Play 38.9M installs, US Books Top Grossing 4 Signed, credited authors and paid acquisition at orders of magnitude more spend; RedChapters content is unattributed and cheap to produce Dreame Android 2018 Play 41.5M, Top Grossing #6 The werewolf-romance leader, with a licensed book library and author community; RedChapters monetizes through a rewarded-ad ladder AlphaNovel Android 2021 Play 2.22M, Top Grossing #23 Also werewolf-focused, pure-coin model; RedChapters is an ads + coins hybrid AnyStories Android 2025-02 Play 880k, +32k in 7 days Carries the original 'Game of Destiny'; Reddit users say RedChapters' 'The Cursed Blood' is a near copy of it (unverified) NovelFlow Android 2022 Play 2.33M Unlocks by watching ads with no escalation; readers use it as a fully free benchmark. RedChapters adds +1 ads per chapter Noel Novel Android 2026-06 52k on Play Carries the same books under different names, and readers are pointed there to read for free Galatea(Inkitt) Android 2018 Play 12.4M Subscription-based, more premium; readers put off by RedChapters' ads are often referred here MoonLit / WolfFiction / LycanFiction and other niche apps Android 2022–2025 Play 20–480k Same niche, same model, nearly indistinguishable - Where users come from
- Verified In-game story-snippet ads → readers search the title: r/NovelsRequest reader: 'I watched it in a game, then searched'; r/FindThatNovel: 'I saw it in an ad too'. The developer has Ball Sort Puzzle 100M+ and other casual games, so cross-promotion is possible (whether it's self-promo or bought media is unverified)
- Verified Long-tail traffic from Reddit book-request communities: from 2026-04 to 09, at least 7 posts say 'only on RedChapters', with up to 308 comments on a single post. These are user-generated, not official
- Verified Legacy users migrated (re-listed under a new package): r/RomanceNovelHub 2026-04-18 'Redchapters replaced Fantales, which was pulled'; the first-gen com.red.chapters was taken down 2026-04-23. App Store reviews include legacy users finding their installed version has been replaced
- Inferred Store keywords and book titles: the subtitle 'Billionaire & Werewolf Romance', and the description lists popular book titles to capture title searches
- Inferred Paid acquisition (Meta/TikTok/Google): none of our three ad libraries tracks this company, so we can't check. AppGoblin detects 4 attribution SDKs
Why RedChapters (HM Games L.L.C-FZ) took off
- Package: com.next.red.chapters (Google Play, Books & Reference); same iOS id6763258930 (Books category)
- Developer: HM Games L.L.C-FZ (UAE; website hmgames.net calls itself a 'casual puzzle game publisher'; LinkedIn company page is in Vietnam, vn.linkedin.com/company/hmgames). Related entity: HM Games Pty Ltd (Australia, hmgames.au)
- Listed: iOS 2026-05-01; the Play store date reads 2026-09-22, but that date was reset (see below)
- Monetization: hybrid chapter unlocks. Watch rewarded ads (the number of ads per chapter rises chapter by chapter), wait 8 hours for a free chapter, or buy coins (IAP $0.49–$99.99). AppGoblin estimates Android revenue at 53% IAP / 47% ads
Bottom line
This isn't a newly emerged hit. It's a casual game publisher taking the 'rewarded video + IAP' monetization and game-based paid acquisition it knows best and applying them to English werewolf/CEO romance fiction, with the same books under a third brand: Fantales (2025) → RedChapters gen 1 (2025) → RedChapters gen 2 (2026-05). It ranks 147 on the US Books Top Grossing chart, driven by three things: ① long-form 'exclusive' novels with vague attribution that can't be found elsewhere (readers on Reddit say they read like AI-written, and some point to the popular book 'Game of Destiny' as the source); ② story-snippet ads in-game that hook readers, who then search the title and find only this app; ③ an ad-count escalation ('+1 ads per chapter') that turns reading time into ad revenue and pressures users to pay. Scale is small (160k cumulative Play installs, now just over two thousand a week) and the chart rank is sliding. It hasn't really broken out. It's a small product kept alive by resources and distribution, and it earns steady money.
1. Data
Google Play (googleplay database; pre-July history estimated with AppstoreSpy)
| Date | Total installs | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-09 | 108,634 | AppstoreSpy estimate (app_day_ext), two and a half months before the store's "9-22 listed" date |
| 2026-08-17 | 130,297 | AppstoreSpy estimate |
| 2026-09-15 | 140,530 | AppstoreSpy estimate |
| 2026-10-04 | 150,423 | AppstoreSpy estimate |
| 2026-10-29 | 158,013 | Our own library |
| 2026-11-06 | 160,265 | 7-day new installs: 2,252 |
- The store date was reset: by July it already had 108k installs. A Brave search found a negative review on the Play page, dated 2026-07-01 ("First 5 chapters free, then watch 1 ads, then 2, 3, 4… I gave up"). AppInsider logged 'published on Google Play' 9-22 and 9-23 version 1.2.1, likely when the listing was changed or re-listed.
- The curve keeps flattening: in mid-July roughly 1,000+ per day (AppstoreSpy estimate), 8 to September three or four hundred a day, and from October on two or three hundred a day. No stretch is accelerating. The biggest chunk came before July: roughly 100k accumulated over about two months up to 5, and there's no data on how.
- The chart rank is sliding (chart_rank): US Books Top Grossing went 10-29 → 118,11-06 → 147; UK Top Grossing went from 10-31 to 11-04 and dropped out of the top 200 starting around 72–80,11-05. On 10-29 it charted in 18 category charts, but by 11-06 only 5 storefronts remained (US 147, HK 189, India 199, Turkey 200, Singapore 200), all at the bottom of Books Top Grossing. The recall-card signal of '160k installs got it onto Top Grossing' should be discounted: past roughly #150 on Books Top Grossing the bar is low, and it has been sliding all week.
- Ratings: 796 Play ratings, 4.5 stars, adding 5–18 per day; distribution [27, 0, 88, 103, 571]. 2-star ratings went from 6 to 0, and 1-star ratings went from 12 to 29 and back to 27. Signs of ratings being cleaned up, cause unverified. Only 15 written reviews on Play.
- Developer's other apps in the database: HM Games L.L.C-FZ has Solitaire Stack Sort (897k installs) and RedChapters; HM Games Pty Ltd has Duck War (79k, up 73k in 7 days). On AppBrain, HM Games L.L.C-FZ's catalog includes Ball Sort Puzzle® (100M+ installs).
iOS (appstore library)
- US store: 4,838 ratings, averaging 4.67 stars; 50 more in 7 days (5–12 per day); AU 533, CA 492.
- Best Books Top Grossing ranks: US #159, AU #100, CA #106. AppInsider logged it at #2026-09-24 on the UK Books Top Grossing chart and #63 and #10-02 on other storefronts, and it reached the top 100 of India's Books Top Grossing.
- Updated weekly from October (1.9.0 → 2.0.0) and ran three in-app events: 'The Seventh Time', 'My Sister Stole My Husband', and 'The Cursed Blood: Interactive' (interactive choice-driven story). Source: AppInsider timeline.
Third-party estimates (all are estimates; use them for scale only)
- AppGoblin (Android): about 24k MAU, monthly revenue <$10k, 4 weekly new installs of 14k; detected 14 ad networks, 3 mediation platforms, 4 attribution SDKs (appgoblin.info/apps/com.next.red.chapters).
- paywallscreens.com: iOS estimate $5K/month (an earlier search snippet said $40K/month; the page was later updated).
- AppInsider: 100+ downloads a day across all platforms, 10k+ a month.
2. Origin: the same books under a third brand
| Brand | Platform / ID | Persona | Timeline | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RedChapters gen 1 | iOS id6741507676;Play com.red.chapters | HM Games Pty Ltd / L.L.C-FZ | iOS about 2025, early in the year (Apptopia has a page 2025-04); Play 2025-06 | Play only 207 downloads, 2026-04-23 removed (chrome-stats); iOS already removed (AppGoblin) |
| Fantales | iOS id6746925273;Play com.next.fantales | HM Games Pty Ltd | Around 2025-06 | MWM logged 49k+ downloads, with reviews mostly 1–2 stars (too many ads, stories left unfinished); now removed |
| RedChapters gen 2 | iOS id6763258930;Play com.next.red.chapters | HM Games L.L.C-FZ | iOS 2026-05-01 | This app |
- Reddit r/RomanceNovelHub (2026-04-18): 'I read The Cursed Blood on Redchapters on Play; this app replaced Fantales, which was somehow pulled.'
- Reddit r/NovelsRequest (2026-04-19): 'There are several apps under different names, including Fantales and Red Chapters, all carrying the same werewolf stories by the same unattributed author.'
- Reddit r/Findfreenovellinks (2026-05): 'There seem to be two RedChapters with the same icon.' App Store reviews include legacy users saying they stopped at chapter 196, and only after checking the store found their installed app 'is outdated and was replaced'.
- In other words, the catalog and users moved over from Fantales and the first-gen RedChapters: new package, new entity, re-listed. The reset store date and the ~100k installs by July both fit this path.
3. Where users come from
- In-game 'story snippet' ads drive readers to search the title (confirmed by user quotes). r/NovelsRequest 'The cursed blood novel' (126 comments): 'I saw an ad while playing a game, then searched for it'; r/FindThatNovel 'The Bastard Heir': 'I also saw it in an ad'; the poster's own words: 'I watched an ad and…'. The standard sequence for these posts: an ad shows a painful opening → the reader searches the title → finds only RedChapters has it → posts asking for a free link → finds none → downloads. HM Games has high-traffic casual games like Ball Sort Puzzle (100M+), so cross-promotion is an easy option. But whether the ads run inside its own games or are bought through AppLovin/Unity and similar networks is unverified. Our Meta, TikTok (Europe), and Google ad libraries don't track this company (not finding it doesn't mean it didn't advertise).
- Long-tail search from Reddit book-request communities: r/NovelsRequest, r/Findfreenovellinks (17k subscribers), r/novelslovers, and r/FindThatNovel repeatedly mention 'only RedChapters has it' (from 2026-04 to 09, at least 7 posts, with up to 308 comments on one post). These posts aren't official. Users wrote them after being pulled in by the ads, and they in turn became an entry point when people Google book titles. One user claims 'this company is getting free sites that carried their books taken down' (unverified), which suggests they're actively protecting 'only available here'.
- Store search / keywords: the title and subtitle 'Billionaire & Werewolf Romance', and the description lists popular book titles outright (My Sister Stole My Husband, The Cursed Blood, Blood Deep, The Spare They Came Begging For, The Cull Order, The Seventh Time). That's aimed at people searching for titles.
- Legacy user migration: readers of Fantales and the first-gen RedChapters were directed to the new package (see section 2).
- Not found: a TikTok search for 'redchapters' turned up no relevant videos (TikHub, 20 results, all unrelated); X (x-radar, 90 days) 0 posts; no media coverage; the official site redchapters.com has no content.
4. Competitors
English web-novel apps are one of the most crowded categories. In the US Play Books Top Grossing top 150 11-06, about 70 are web-novel apps, and RedChapters is ranked 147.
| Product | Platform | Launched | Scale (Play cumulative installs, googleplay library 11-06) | How RedChapters differs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GoodNovel(GoodNovel) | Android/iOS | 2020 | 38.9M, US Books Top Grossing #4 | Signed authors, bylines, an author ecosystem: paid acquisition at a scale orders of magnitude bigger |
| Dreame(Dreame Media) | Android/iOS | 2018 | 41.5M, Top Grossing 6 | The werewolf-genre leader, big back catalog of rights, has an author community |
| WebNovel (Cloudary/Yuewen) | Android/iOS | 2017 | 32.3M, Top Grossing 7 | Big-tech players, translated web novels, original platforms |
| AlphaNovel(Brailion) | Android/iOS | 2021 | 2.22M, Top Grossing 23 | Also werewolf-focused, credited authors, coins only |
| AnyStories(HK Zhonghe) | Android/iOS | 2025-02 | 880k, 7 days +32k, Top Grossing 42 | Has Game of Destiny (Lina Ljunggren); Reddit users say RedChapters' The Cursed Blood is a near copy of it |
| NovelFlow(rnovel) | Android | 2022 | 2.33M, Top Grossing 36 | Unlocks by watching ads, no push to pay more; users treat it as the 'can read completely free' benchmark |
| MoonLit / WolfFiction / LycanFiction / Romanfic | Android | 2022–2025 | 20–480k | Same vertical genre; RedChapters and these are nearly indistinguishable |
| Noel Novel(24Books) | Android/iOS | 2026-06 | 52k | Reddit says RedChapters' The Bastard Heir is free on Noel under the renamed title Hood Walking Away, with the same content |
| Galatea(Inkitt) | Android/iOS | 2018 | 12.4M | Subscription-based, premium positioning; where readers get pushed by RedChapters' ad ladder go instead |
| Wattpad | Android / iOS / web | 2006 | 346M | Free UGC, big platforms |
| New small brands like VelloraNovel, CrownNovel, etc. | Android | 2026-09 | 5k–9k | New entrants charting in the same period show the category gets re-skinned and re-entered every week |
5. What makes it different
- The monetization model is a game company's, not a web-novel company's: the first 5–6 chapters are free, then each chapter costs 30 coins; or you watch ads, 1 ads on chapter 1 (chapter n requires n ads; users reported 11, 18, 41 ads); or you wait 8 hours for the next chapter to unlock automatically. It takes the casual-game model of rewarded video + energy regeneration + in-app purchases and transplants it wholesale. Most other web-novel apps use pure coins + check-ins, or a fixed number of ads to unlock (NovelFlow). It bundles ad revenue and IAP together: the deeper you read, the more you're pushed to pay. A user calculated that reading all of the 428-chapter The Cursed Blood still costs another $49. AppGoblin's estimate of IAP/ad 53/47 also lines up. 14 ad networks plus 3 mediation platforms is standard practice for game teams.
- Low content cost, and it can't be found off-app: books carry no byline, or use pen names like 'T. A. Novels'; the same books get shuffled back and forth between Fantales and RedChapters; readers commonly say it's repetitive, drags, and 'reads like AI wrote it, with almost no dialogue'; the app pops up a prompt every few chapters asking whether the grammar and syntax meet your expectations (it looks like feedback collection on generated or rewritten text); and it's accused of being highly similar to Game of Destiny. Plagiarism and AI generation are unverified, but 'this is the only place to read it' is the precondition for its ad conversion.
- The interactive-story (Interactive Choose) event only came out in October, and we haven't seen it bring any incremental growth yet.
Why it ran up the charts: items ① and ② together determine that it 'earns more from each user', which is why 160k installs can still sit at the tail of Top Grossing. But neither point is a moat: the monetization model is being roundly criticized by users (the negative-review themes on the App Store, Play, and Reddit are almost all about ad escalation), and the content is easy to repackage under other names (Noel Novel already does this). It survives mainly on a game company's ready-made capabilities: ad monetization, paid acquisition, relaunching under new packages, not on a better product.
6. How many people see it
- Revenue isn't public; there are only automated estimate pages like paywallscreens ($5K/month) and AppGoblin (<$10k/month). No media coverage, no X discussion, no TikTok content.
- The only people who know it are readers in the Reddit book-request communities, and they're mostly complaining.
- Copycats: the category is already full of re-skins, so there's no specific party copying it; but the same books appear on Noel Novel, and the developers themselves rotate among multiple brands, Fantales and RedChapters across two generations.
7. What's worth borrowing
- A game team's playbook for content apps: rewarded video that escalates with depth, a 'wait N hours' energy mechanic, and coin-based IAP, one model that captures both ad and payment revenue.
- 'Not findable' is itself a conversion tool: ads plant the hook, the books exist only inside the app, readers search titles on Reddit and Google, and in the end they have to come back and download.
- When a package gets delisted or its reputation sours, they switch brands and relaunch under a new entity, migrating the catalog and users over. The playbook holds up, but mind its ceiling: across three generations it has only reached a few hundred thousand installs.
8. What's still uncertain
- How the 100k installs before July came about (migrated old users, cross-promotion from the studio's other games, or paid acquisition) can't be separated with any data; why the Play Store date reset on 9-22 also remains unexplained.
- Whether the ads that brought readers in were run inside HM Games' own games or bought from ad networks is unverified; none of our three ad libraries track this company.
- Whether the content is AI-generated, or rewritten from popular books like Game of Destiny, rests only on readers' claims.
- Revenue is only third-party estimates (iOS $5K–40K/month, Android <$10k/month), with a large spread.
Sources
- googleplay library: app_profile / app_snap / app_day / app_day_ext (AppstoreSpy estimates) / chart_rank / developer, 2026-10-29 to 11-06
- appstore library: app_profile / app_day (id6763258930)
- iTunes lookup: id6763258930, developer id1882569974 (Ball Sort Puzzle, Solitaire Stack Sort, Hole Jam, etc., 11 titles in total); id6741507676, id6746925273 can no longer be found
- AppInsider timeline appinsider.io/apps/redchapters-6763258930
- AppGoblin appgoblin.info/apps/com.next.red.chapters, appgoblin.info/apps/com.red.chapters, appgoblin.info/apps/com.next.fantales
- chrome-stats chrome-stats.com/d/com.red.chapters (first-gen Play version delisted 2026-04-23, 207 downloads)
- paywallscreens www.paywallscreens.com/apps/redchapters-mobile-paywall-8010
- MWM mwm.ai/apps/fantales/6746925273, mwm.ai/apps/app/6763258930
- Reddit (Brave search excerpts): r/NovelsRequest 1sjmj2e, 1spwn61, 1tocs54, 1u84xsn; r/RomanceNovelHub 1sok3so; r/Findfreenovellinks 1tb2r5s; r/FindThatNovel 1tmxh8t; r/novelslovers 1wm49hr
- App Store and Play user reviews (Brave excerpts)
- TikHub TikTok search for 'redchapters' and x-radar search for 'redchapters' (90 days): no relevant content found