Radish Fiction Announces Launch of Premium Branded Originals

Radish, a short-form serialized fiction platform capitalizing on the shift to mobile reading, today announced the launch of Radish Originals, its first foray into producing in-house serialized stories. To oversee the initiative, Radish brought Sue Johnson on board as CCO and to head its New York office. Johnson formerly served as VP of Programming at ABC Daytime, where she oversaw the soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live, and most recently was at Pocket Gems mobile interactive storytelling app Episode. Additionally, Radish expanded its senior team with the appointments of Filippo De Rose as CMO, Taylor Carlson as Head of Content Strategy, Jonghun Shin as CTO, and Seyoon Kyle Choi as VP of Engineering.

"Radish is rapidly growing and our users are hungry for more diverse content. Sue's experience in serialized storytelling for both the traditional and mobile entertainment space supports our mission to deliver a broad range of premium stories to our readers from not only up-and-coming authors, but well-established writers, which is where Sue's expertise is invaluable. We will be producing stories in TV-style writers' rooms and iterating these stories through data-driven A/B testing often used in mobile gaming studios. We are excited to innovate on how novels are produced and published" said Seung-yoon "SY" Lee, Founder and CEO of Radish.

"Radish reflects the increase in mobile consumption, desire for shorter, bite-size content and consumer's demand for premium storytelling, which makes it a very exciting time to be joining the team," said Johnson. "Radish Originals will showcase powerful writing by masters of the episodic art form, including some of daytime television's most accomplished writers."

To launch Radish Originals, Johnson has brought together six of television's most celebrated Emmy® Award-winning soap opera writers to help pen original stories for the platform, including Jean Passanante, Addie Walsh, Leah Laiman, Tom Casiello, Marlene McPherson and Lisa Connor. Between them, they have 11 Emmy wins, 50 Emmy nominations, 15 Writers Guild Awards and 42 Writers Guild nominations and have worked on every major American soap opera airing in the last 30 years, including All My Children, As the World Turns, Days of Our Lives, Guiding Light, Another World, One Life to Live, General Hospital,Passions,Loving, Search for Tomorrow, andThe Young and the Restless.

CMO De Rose SCALED Pixelberry's interactive storytelling app Choices to a top 10 grossing US app with 100M downloads and 6M MAU when he was head of marketing and ad monetization. The company never received outside financing and was able to grow with 30-day positive ROI. Head of Content Strategy Carlson was part of the founding team of Pocket Gems' Episode which grew to become the top interactive storytelling app with 125mil downloads.

As CTO, Shin brings nearly 20 years of experience to Radish and previously served as co-founder and CTO of KakaoPage, formerly Podotree, the startup behind the largest serial fiction and comics app "KakaoPage" in Korea and the second largest of its kind "Picomma" in Japan. The company made $200m annual revenue in 2018. Prior to joining Radish, Choi served as an engineer at Bluehole, the studio behind global sensation "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds," and was most recently the VP of Engineering at Zigbang, the leading housing market app of Korea.

Offering a range of genres that includes romance, fantasy, YA, paranormal and mystery, Radish Originals aim to highlight diversity and inclusion. Stories will feature a mix of leading characters who are diverse with regards to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age and physical abilities. The first Radish Originals became available in November.

Radish is available on the iOSand Android platforms.

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