A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began
Chinese short drama’s story opens with a format and not with a corporation. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” renders literally, refers to vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a handset held in one hand. With episodes lasting between one and two minutes, a single title typically stretches across reelshortfree 20 to 100 installments. The narratives draw on a reliable kit of premises: tales of revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family conflict. Every one of those premises can be grasped in seconds, and that is important because a whole episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. Considered as a business, the format addresses a question ordinary television seldom had to ask, namely how to sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time. The same product now meets English-language audiences under other labels, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Through every stage of the timeline that follows, this pay-per-piece logic is the common thread.
2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing
The earliest milestone is bureaucratic rather than commercial. Back in 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. That step carries more weight than it might appear: recognition turns a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. Later data 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 new industry, and none of this assured commercial success. Short drama was shifted from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, revealed a sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.
2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office
For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, consider the domestic figures for 2024. According to data published in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China hit 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a landmark crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. That year, producers released more than 30,000 titles. Figures put the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. The volume is as revealing about the industry’s structure as the revenue figure is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. Intense competition is signaled too, as every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Even so, the overseas push had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.
Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave
The first mover was ReelShort, which launched in August 2022. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. Next came DramaBox in April 2023. Its developer is Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, is its owner. Singapore New Reading Technology launched GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a less solid source. Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, together with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech joined in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The common thread is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong standing in front of a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. This corporate map is largely invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who instead see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Operating company | Service | China connection | Launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 a single app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | A unit of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | App owned by Kunlun Tech | Unconfirmed; 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 Against Western Originals
The strategic question, after the apps existed, was what to put in them. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, drew heavily on its home catalogue. 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. According to the same report, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals cost more: TheWrap cites $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Yet 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 specific. DramaBox’s catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company runs a production team in Los Angeles. Most notably, Holywater shows that the originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots; its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025, along with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Report
The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures diverge in revealing ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Sensor Tower’s data puts whole-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, although different reports of the same dataset cite slightly different totals. A broader view comes from Omdia, which estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. In 2026, Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031 in estimates published in August 2026. MPA estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it projects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, its market-share estimates are the most instructive: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, then 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 Ahead
Laid end to end, the milestones show a few patterns. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which gives the first pattern: the overseas business still looks small beside its origin. 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. As DramaBox and ReelShort each bringing in about $140 million in that quarter, competition at the top has tightened as well. Monetization has taken on a recognizable shape. As of September 2026, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, though prices vary by platform, country and promotion. What is most likely to change next is production, since 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. No matter whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase, the product remains what duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.