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A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began

It is a format, not a company, that begins the story of Chinese short drama. The word duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, stands for vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. A single title usually extends over 20 to 100 episodes, with each episode running between one and two minutes. The stories pull from a reliable stock of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family conflict. An entire episode has to fruit love hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away, so it matters that each of those setups can be understood in seconds. Traditional television rarely had to ask how to sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time, yet seen as a business, the format solves exactly that question. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other terms under which English-language audiences now encounter the same product. That pay-per-piece logic underlies every stage of the chronology that follows.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

The opening milestone is bureaucratic rather than commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Recognition turns a loose category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised, which is why that step matters more than it might appear. Since a named genre can be followed from one year to the next, later statistics about the sector can be compared at all. None of this guaranteed commercial success, and attention from a regulator can cut both ways for a new industry. Its effect was to move short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, revealed a sector big enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.

2024: The Year Short Drama Out-Earned the Box Office

The figures from inside China for 2024 are the most obvious measure of how far the format had come. According to figures made public in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China hit 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a landmark crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. That year, producers put out more than 30,000 titles. Over the same twelve months, the audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. That volume is as telling about the industry’s structure as the revenue is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. It also implies fierce competition: every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad, since the overseas push had not waited for this milestone.

Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave

ReelShort went live in August 2022 and was the first to move. The app is run by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox arrived next in April 2023; it is built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, together with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been formally announced. DramaWave, released through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, was the company’s entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The pattern that keeps recurring is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting for a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. That corporate map is mostly invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who instead see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

Once the apps were in place, the key strategic question shifted to what to put in them. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, drew heavily on its domestic catalogue. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had produced for overseas markets, about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 by the estimate of the same report. Since dubbing prolongs the life of titles already paid for, it makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals cost more to make, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but they reach the audience without a translation layer. Back in October 2024, TheWrap found that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; that audience, in other words, is specific. DramaBox maintains a production team in Los Angeles, and its catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Chinese roots are not universal: the originals market has also attracted firms without them, most visibly Holywater, whose My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 along with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Show

The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures diverge in telling ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps was estimated at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the full year, Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, and different reports of the same dataset quote slightly different totals. Taking a wider view, Omdia puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also anticipates the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031 in estimates reported in August 2026. MPA pegs ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in its work is more telling for this timeline than its market-share estimates: about 29 percent outside China for ReelShort, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, roughly 69 percent in total for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Forward

Lay the milestones end to end and a few patterns stand out. The first is that the overseas business still looks small beside its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. Second, growth is likely cooling: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year. As DramaBox and ReelShort each bringing in about $140 million in that quarter, competition at the top has grown closer as well. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has settled into a recognizable shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. Production is the area most likely to change next: DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. Regardless of whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product stays what duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.