A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began
The story of Chinese short drama opens with a screen format rather than a company. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, refers to vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. With episodes running one to two minutes, a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 installments. A reliable toolkit of premises drives the storylines: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family micro drama conflict. Every one of those premises can be grasped in seconds, and that is crucial because an entire episode has to land 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 chunks small enough to price one at a time. English-language audiences now find the same product under other tags, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Across every stage of the timeline that follows, this pay-per-piece logic is the thread.
2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official
The earliest milestone is administrative rather than commercial. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. Recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised, which is why that step matters more than it might appear. Later statistics about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next. Nothing about this guaranteed commercial success, and attention from a regulator can cut both ways for a fledgling industry. Short drama was pushed 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 big enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.
2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office
How far the format had come is shown most clearly by the home-market figures for 2024. Figures released in mid-2025 put short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For the first time, the sector out-earned China’s box office, a landmark crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. More than 30,000 titles hit the market in 2024. Over the same twelve months, the audience was put at 662 million viewers. A business rolling out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale, so this volume says as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. It also suggests intense competition, since every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Even so, the drive overseas had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad.
Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox arrived, made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, though no rename has been formally announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech joined the field with DramaWave, which it published through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. The repeating pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. For people who watch dramas online in English, that corporate map is largely invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Company behind it | App name | China connection | Launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backed by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | Singapore 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; both names appear to belong to one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Belongs to Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech’s own app | Unconfirmed; highest global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No Chinese link; Fox Entertainment equity stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals
Once the apps were in place, the strategic question turned to what to fill them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its domestic catalogue. The company had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent of them were original overseas productions. That same report pegged the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes plain sense for a company with a deep domestic library, because it stretches 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. This audience is well defined: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox’s lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company operates a production team in Los Angeles. Most notably, 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: The Market Trackers’ Numbers
By 2025 several research firms were monitoring the overseas business, and their figures differ 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 estimated at about $700 million. Over the full 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 give slightly different totals. A broader 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 expects the US to reach $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. MPA estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Its market-share estimates are the most telling for this timeline: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, then 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
When the milestones are laid end to end, several patterns stand out. The first is that the overseas business still looks small next to its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, which suggests the second pattern, a likely cooling of growth. At the top, competition has grown tighter too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned 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 including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by country, platform and promotion. Production is the area most likely to change next: DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $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 claim the next phase, the product stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.