A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju at Home

Chinese short drama’s story starts with a screen format rather than a corporation. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, refers to vertical series set at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one hand. A single title usually runs to 20 to 100 episodes, with episodes lasting between one and two minutes. The plots are drawn from a reliable set of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family conflict and hidden-identity reveals. Each of these premises can be picked up in seconds, which counts for a lot when a whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb moves on. From a business Worthless to Priceless: The Alpha’s Rejected Mate drama angle, the format answers a question that traditional television rarely needed to ask: how does one sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. The same product now reaches English-language audiences under other names, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Every stage of the timeline that follows is connected by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

The opening milestone turns out to be regulatory, not a commercial one. In 2020, duanju was officially recognized as a genre by the Chinese regulator, the NRTA. That step matters more than it might appear: recognition transforms a fuzzy category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. Following a named genre from one year to the next is feasible, and that is what enables later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. Business success was not ensured by any of this, and for a new industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways. Short drama was shifted from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, the data showed a sector large enough to be compared against the country’s cinemas.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

How far the format had come is captured most clearly by the home-market figures for 2024. In China, short drama revenue hit 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, going by data released in mid-2025. That was the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was put at 662 million viewers. Producers rolled out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. The volume is as telling about the industry’s structure as the revenue figure is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. It also points to fierce competition, since every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad, since the push abroad had not waited for this milestone.

Moving Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave

ReelShort was first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, came next in April 2023. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a thinner source. Alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been officially announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name. Kunlun Tech joined in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The repeating pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting for a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. Most 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.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

The strategic question, after the apps existed, became what to stock them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its domestic library. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had produced for overseas markets 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. Dubbing makes plain sense for a company with an extensive domestic library, because it stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they cost more, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. That audience is well defined: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis appear in the catalogue of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been pulled into the originals market. The best-known is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, along with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Say

The overseas business had drawn the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their estimates diverge in telling ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, of which the United States contributed 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the whole year, Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent; different reports of the same dataset quote slightly different totals. Omdia offers a broader view: it puts 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. In 2026, Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia pegged 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. For this timeline, its market-share estimates are the most revealing: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Forward

A few patterns become clear when the milestones are lined up end to end. 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 small next to its origin. The second pattern is that growth is likely slowing, as Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter, which means competition at the top has tightened as well. 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 produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. What is being sold remains the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.