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A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market

Chinese short drama’s tale starts with a format instead of a corporation. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” translates word for word, refers to vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. Since episodes last one to two minutes, a single title generally takes 20 to 100 episodes. The plots are drawn from a dependable kit of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, reveals watch reelshort of identity and family strife. Every one of those setups can be picked up in seconds, which counts for a lot when an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb flicks onward. Seen as a business, the format settles a question regular television hardly ever had to ask, specifically how to sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other labels under which English-speaking audiences now encounter the same product. That pay-per-piece logic is the thread tying together every stage of the timeline laid out here.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map

The earliest milestone turns out to be administrative, not a commercial one. In 2020, duanju was formally acknowledged as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. Recognition converts a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, which is why the step matters more than it might appear. Because a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, later numbers about the sector are able to be compared at all. For a fledgling industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways, and none of this ensured commercial success. What it did was nudge short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, the data revealed a sector big enough to be compared against the country’s cinemas.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

The domestic figures for 2024 are the sharpest measure of how far the format had come. Short drama revenue in China climbed to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures made public in mid-2025. It marked the first time the sector out-earned China’s box office: a landmark crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. The viewership that year was put at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles hit the market over the same twelve months. A business rolling out tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale, so that output reveals as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. It also points to fierce competition, since every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The push abroad had not, however, waited for this milestone; several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.

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

ReelShort went live in August 2022 and was first out of the gate. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. Then came DramaBox in April 2023. Beijing Dianzhong Technology develops it, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, is its owner. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, a company 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, plus 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been officially announced. Kunlun Tech entered in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business; going by Sensor Tower’s data, its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. A business whose capital or parentage traces back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the recurring pattern. This corporate map is largely invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals

What to fill the apps with became the strategic question after they existed. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its home library. 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. According to the same report, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Because dubbing extends the life of titles already paid for, it makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals are more expensive: TheWrap cites $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Still, they reach the audience without a translation layer. This audience is specific: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company operates a production team in Los Angeles. Most visibly, Holywater shows that the originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots; its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025, plus a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Say

By 2025 several research firms were following the overseas business, and their figures diverge in instructive ways. The United States accounted for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of global in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower put at about $700 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. Omdia takes a broader view: it estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is what Omdia also expects the US to reach in 2026. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia pegged revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. MPA puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it forecasts $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. Its market-share estimates are the most instructive for this timeline: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, followed by DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, for a combined share of roughly 69 percent for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Into the Future

Lined up end to end, the milestones reveal a few patterns. First, the overseas business still looks small next to its origin: Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second pattern is that growth is likely cooling, as Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. Among the leaders, competition has grown closer too: DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter. 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. DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, which makes production the area most likely to change next. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, stays the product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.