A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market
The story of Chinese short drama begins with a format rather than a company. Translated literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it covers vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. A single title typically spans 20 to 100 installments, with episodes playing for one to two minutes. The stories build on a trusty stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family feuds and hidden-identity reveals. Every mobile drama app one of those setups can be grasped in seconds, and that matters when a whole episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. Viewed as a business, the format addresses a question ordinary television rarely had to ask, specifically how to sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. English-speaking audiences now encounter the same product under other terms, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic is the thread running through every stage of the timeline below.
2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre
Regulatory rather than commercial: that is the nature of the first milestone. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. The step matters more than it might look, because recognition converts a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. Since a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, later figures about the sector can be compared at all. For a nascent industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways, and none of this assured commercial success. It did, move short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, pointed to a sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.
2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office
Nothing captures how far the format had come as clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. Data released in mid-2025 placed short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. That was the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. Figures put the audience that year at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, producers put out more than 30,000 titles. This volume says as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. Intense competition is implied too, because every one of those titles competes for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad, as the push abroad had not waited for this milestone.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. It is managed by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is supported by China-based COL Group. Next up came DramaBox in April 2023. Its developer is Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. In June 2023 GoodShort arrived under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a thinner source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture launched 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. Kunlun Tech joined the market in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business; going by Sensor Tower’s data, its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. The common thread is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong standing in front of 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: what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Company behind it | App name | Chinese tie | Launched |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backing from 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 under Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; both names appear to belong to one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Part of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | An app from Kunlun Tech | Not officially confirmed; top global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No link; stake held by Fox Entertainment since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals
As soon as the apps existed, the strategic question became what to fill them with. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, leaned heavily on its domestic catalogue. The company had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent of them were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 by the estimate 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 deep domestic library. 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. That audience is specific: TheWrap reported in October 2024 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 runs a production team in Los Angeles. Most prominently, 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, 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 telling ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps was estimated at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States accounting for 49 percent, or roughly $350 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. Taking a broader view, Omdia puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is the amount Omdia also projects the US to reach in 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 in estimates reported in August 2026. ReelShort’s revenue comes to $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. The most telling figures for this timeline are MPA’s market-share estimates: 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
Lay the milestones end to end and several patterns stand out. The first pattern is one of scale: the overseas business still looks modest beside its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second is a likely cooling of growth, with Sensor Tower putting the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. The race at the top has grown tighter as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Prices vary by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has settled into a familiar shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly creates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. What is being sold is still the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase.