A One-Handed Format: Duanju in Its Home Market
The history of Chinese short drama starts with a viewing format rather than a corporation. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” translates literally, refers to vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Every episode lasts from one to two minutes, while a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 instalments. The storylines are built from a dependable set of premises: billionaire and CEO watch Reborn to Revenge: The Betrayed Luna romance, revenge plots, family feuds and hidden-identity reveals. Each of those setups can be understood in seconds, which is important when an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb moves on. Considered as a business, the format settles a question conventional television rarely had to ask, that is, how to sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time. English-language viewers now come across the same product under other tags, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Each stage of the timeline ahead is connected by this pay-per-piece logic.
2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official
It’s an administrative milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, officially recognized duanju as a genre. Since recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, that step matters more than it might seem. Since a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, later numbers about the sector can be compared at all. Regulatory attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry, and none of this assured commercial success. Short drama was pushed from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters was what that data showed four years later.
2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office
Nothing shows how far the format had come more clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. Data released in mid-2025 placed short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. It was the first year the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a headline crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. Production companies put out more than 30,000 titles that year. The audience over the same twelve months was estimated at 662 million viewers. This volume reveals as much about the industry’s shape as the revenue does, because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale. It also points to fierce competition: every one of those titles is fighting 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 Driving the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, manages the app, and China-based COL Group stands behind the studio. Then came DramaBox in April 2023. It is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a thinner source. Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, though no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech entered in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. Over and over, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong stands in front of a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. For people who watch dramas online in English, that corporate map is largely invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Operator | App | Link to China | Debut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backed by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | Singapore subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly a part of Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names appear to be one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Sits within Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech’s own app | Unconfirmed; topped global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No Chinese link; Fox Entertainment equity stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals
The strategic question, after the apps existed, was what to stock them with. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, leaned heavily on its domestic catalogue. It had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent of them were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. In that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was put at $100,000 to $150,000. For a company with a rich domestic library, dubbing makes plain sense, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US, which shows that this audience is specific. Series such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis sit in the library of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also attracted companies without them, most visibly Holywater, whose My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 together with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Report
By 2025 several research firms were monitoring the overseas business, and their figures vary in telling ways. The United States contributed 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower estimated at about $700 million. For the full year, Sensor Tower’s data sets 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. A wider view comes from Omdia, which estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, including $3 billion earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, or half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia placed revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. ReelShort’s revenue stands at $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. MPA’s market-share estimates are the most instructive for this timeline: 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 Into the Future
A few patterns emerge when the milestones are laid end to end. The first is that the overseas business still looks modest next to its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second pattern is that growth is likely slowing, as Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. Among the leaders, competition has grown tighter too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on a familiar shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, so production is the area most likely to change next. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, remains the product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.
