A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began
It is a format, not a corporation, that begins the story of Chinese short drama. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, describes vertical series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. A single title generally runs to 20 to 100 episodes, with each episode running between one and two minutes. Writers’ plots are built from a dependable stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, short dramas for free family conflict and identity reveals. Every one of those setups can be grasped in seconds, and that is important because a whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb moves on. Looked at as a business, the format solves a question conventional television hardly ever had to ask, in other words how to sell a story in portions small enough to price one at a time. Under different names, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-speaking audiences now encounter the same product. Each stage of the timeline that follows is linked by this pay-per-piece logic.
2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing
The opening milestone is regulatory rather than commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. This move is more important than it might seem: recognition converts a fuzzy category of online clips into something able to be classified, counted and supervised. A genre with a name can be tracked from one year to the next, which is what lets later data about the sector to be compared at all. For a nascent industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. Recognition did, however, move short drama from the edges 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 measured against the country’s movie theaters.
2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office
The domestic figures for 2024 are the clearest measure of how far the format had come. Short drama revenue in China hit 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to numbers released in mid-2025. It marked the first time the sector out-earned China’s box office: a telling crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. Studios released more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. Because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale, that volume reveals as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. Fierce competition is signaled too, because 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 offering the same model abroad, because the overseas push had not waited for this milestone.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave
ReelShort launched in August 2022 and was first off the line. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, manages the app, and China-based COL Group stands behind the studio. DramaBox, developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, followed in April 2023. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a shakier 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 another name, although no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech arrived in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business; going by Sensor Tower’s data, its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. What recurs is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong in front of a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. What people who watch dramas online in English actually see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; the corporate map is largely invisible from where they sit.
| Operating company | Service | China connection | Launched |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backed by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | Subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly belongs to Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names appear to be a single app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Sits within Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech app | Not officially confirmed; top global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | None; Fox Entertainment has held a stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals
Once the apps were in place, the strategic question became what to put in them. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its domestic catalogue. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had made for overseas markets 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 deep domestic library, dubbing makes obvious sense, because it prolongs the life of titles already paid for. Western originals cost more to make, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but they reach the audience without a translation layer. TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US, so that audience is well defined. DramaBox has a production team in Los Angeles, and its library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Companies without Chinese roots have also been drawn into the originals market. The most prominent is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app secured an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, together 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 estimates differ in revealing ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps reached about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, 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 give slightly different totals. A broader view comes from Omdia, which puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, including $3 billion earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, which would be half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia put 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 and projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Its market-share estimates are the most telling 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.
Looking Ahead Along the Timeline
Lined up end to end, the milestones reveal a few patterns. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which points to the first pattern: the overseas business still looks modest next to its origin. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, which suggests the second pattern, a likely slowing of growth. The contest at the top has tightened as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled into a recognizable shape. As of September 2026, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, though prices vary by platform, country and promotion. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue exceeded $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase, the product remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.
