A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market
Chinese short drama’s story opens with a screen format and not with a firm. The word duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, denotes upright series shot at 9:16 reel shorts free for a phone held in one hand. Since episodes last one to two minutes, a single title usually needs 20 to 100 episodes. A dependable set of premises underpins the plots: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family conflict and hidden-identity reveals. Each one of those premises can be grasped in seconds, and that matters when an entire episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. Commercially speaking, the format tackles a question that conventional television rarely faced: how can you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time. The very same product now greets English-language audiences under other terms, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic threads through every stage of the chronology ahead.
2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map
It is a regulatory milestone, not a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Because recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, the step matters more than it might seem. Since a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, later statistics about the sector are able to be compared at all. A regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry, and none of this assured commercial success. Short drama was moved from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years afterward, that data revealed a sector big enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.
2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office
The home-market figures for 2024 are the sharpest measure of how far the format had come. According to data released in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China hit 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. That was the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. Figures placed the audience that year at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, producers rolled out more than 30,000 titles. The volume is as informative about the industry’s makeup as the revenue is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. Every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also implies intense competition. The overseas push had not, however, waited for this milestone; several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad by 2024.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave
ReelShort launched in August 2022 and was first off the line. Behind the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is backed by China-based COL Group. 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 connected to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under a different name, even though no rename has been officially announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech came in with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower the company’s FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. The recurring pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. Much of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: all they notice is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Operating company | App name | Link to China | Launch date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backed by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | A 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 | Belongs to Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech app | Not confirmed; topped global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No Chinese link; stake held by Fox Entertainment since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals
With the apps in place, the strategic question turned to what to stock them with. According to a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by leaning 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 in the view of the same report. Since dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been paid for, it makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library. Although Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, they reach the audience without a translation layer. In October 2024, TheWrap found that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; the audience, in other words, is well defined. DramaBox’s catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company maintains a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been attracted to the originals market. The best-known is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, plus a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Report
The overseas business had drawn the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their estimates differ in telling ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to 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 places 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. 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. For 2026, Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia, in estimates reported in August 2026, put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. MPA estimates 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 telling for this timeline: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, or roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.
Where the Timeline Points Next
Several patterns stand out when the milestones are lined up end to end. The first point is one of scale: the overseas business still looks small next to its origin, because 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 over year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. At the top, competition has grown tighter too: DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in 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 including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. Production is the part of the business most likely to change next: 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. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.