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A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began

The account of Chinese short drama begins with a viewing format rather than a company. Translated literally, the Chinese term duanju means “short drama”, and it refers to upright series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. The episodes run from one to two minutes, and a single title normally runs to 20 to 100 instalments. A reliable set of premises supplies the stories: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, identity reveals reels short app and family strife. Each of those setups can be followed in seconds, which matters when a complete episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. In business terms, the format tackles a question that conventional television hardly ever faced: how do you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. English-language viewers now run into the same product under other terms, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic underlies every stage of the timeline ahead.

2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre

The first milestone is regulatory rather than commercial. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, formally recognized 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. Later figures about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be followed from one year to the next. A regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a new industry, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. What it did was move short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, showed a sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.

2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office

For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, look at the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China climbed to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to numbers made public in mid-2025. For an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a symbolic crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. Figures put the audience that year at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles hit the market over the same twelve months. This volume tells as much about the industry’s shape as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing ideas at scale. The volume also implies intense competition: every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The overseas push had not, however, waited for this milestone; a number of Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.

Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave

ReelShort was first out of the gate, going live in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, runs the app, and China-based COL Group stands behind the studio. DramaBox, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, followed in April 2023. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a less solid source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the 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; according to Sensor Tower, its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. A business whose capital or parentage traces back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the repeating pattern. 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.

Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals

The strategic question, once the apps existed, became what to put in them. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its home library. 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 by the estimate of the same report. Dubbing makes good sense for a company with a deep domestic library, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals cost more, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but 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 has a production team in Los Angeles, and its lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Most prominently, Holywater shows that the originals market has also attracted 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 Show

The overseas business had drawn the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures differ in revealing ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, global 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. Across 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. A wider view comes from Omdia, which puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, including $3 billion earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, or 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. MPA pegs ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in its work is more telling for this timeline than its market-share estimates: 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 Ahead

When the milestones are lined up end to end, a few patterns emerge. First, the overseas business still looks small compared with its origin: Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. Second, growth is likely cooling: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year. The contest at the top has tightened as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. The way these apps make money has settled into a recognizable shape: across apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026, though prices vary by country, platform and promotion. Production is the area most likely to change next: 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. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase, the product is still the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.