A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil
It is a screen format, not a corporation, that starts the history of Chinese short drama. “Short drama” is the literal translation of duanju, which describes vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. A single title generally runs to 20 to 100 episodes, with each episode lasting one to two minutes. The storylines draw on a trusty stock of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, www.reelshorts.org/where-to-watch/the-hunter-became-the-hunted hidden-identity reveals and family conflict. A whole episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb moves on, so it counts for a lot that each of those setups can be grasped in seconds. In business terms, the format resolves a question that conventional television hardly ever needed to ask: how can you sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other names under which English-speaking audiences now meet the same product. Each stage of the timeline ahead is linked by this pay-per-piece logic.
2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing
The earliest milestone is administrative rather than commercial. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, formally recognized duanju as a genre. Since recognition converts a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, the step matters more than it might appear. Later statistics about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be followed from one year to the next. Regulatory attention can cut both ways for a young industry, and nothing about this guaranteed commercial success. What it did do was push short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector large enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas is what that data showed four years later.
2024: The Year Short Drama Out-Earned the Box Office
Nothing measures how far the format had come as clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to data published in mid-2025. For an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes, it was a telling crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. That year, the audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, producers put out more than 30,000 titles. That volume is as revealing about the industry’s structure as the revenue is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. It also suggests fierce competition, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The overseas push, however, had not waited for this milestone, and by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.
Moving Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Behind the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox followed in April 2023; it is made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, a company 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 formally announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech entered with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. A business whose capital or parentage leads back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the recurring pattern. This corporate map is mostly invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Company | Service | China connection | Launched |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backing from 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 under Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names seem to be one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | A unit of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | An app from Kunlun Tech | Not officially confirmed; highest global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | None; Fox Entertainment stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals
What to put in the apps became the strategic question after they existed. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its home library. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had made for overseas markets, about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. That same report placed the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious sense for a company with a rich domestic library. 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. Back 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. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox offers titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its catalogue. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also drawn in companies without them, most visibly Holywater, whose My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 together with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Report
By 2025 the overseas business was being monitored by several research firms, and their figures vary in instructive ways. The United States accounted for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower put at about $700 million. Different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals, but for the full year Sensor Tower’s data places in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent. Omdia takes a wider view: it puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and predicts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also anticipates the US to climb to $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. Figures from Media Partners Asia, reported in August 2026, placed revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. For ReelShort, MPA estimates 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 instructive for this timeline: ReelShort at 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.
Looking Ahead Along the Timeline
Lay the milestones end to end and a few patterns become clear. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which gives the first pattern: the overseas business still looks modest beside its origin. The second is a likely slowing of growth, with Sensor Tower placing the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. Competition at the top has grown tighter as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled on a consistent shape, and a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by country, platform and promotion. What is most likely to change next is production, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $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 stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.