A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju at Home
The story of Chinese short drama begins with a viewing format rather than a firm. « Short drama » is the literal translation of the Chinese term duanju, a label for vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Each episode plays for one to two minutes, while a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 episodes. The stories build on a proven Bound by Vendetta: Sleeping with the Enemy drama stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family conflict and identity reveals. Each one of those premises can be grasped in seconds, and that is crucial when a whole episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb moves on. Conventional television rarely had to ask how to sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time, yet seen as a business, this format solves exactly that question. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are some of the other terms under which English-language audiences now encounter the same product. This pay-per-piece logic threads through every stage of the timeline ahead.
2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing
The opening milestone is bureaucratic rather than commercial. In 2020, duanju was officially recognized as a genre by the Chinese regulator, the NRTA. Since recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, that step matters more than it might appear. An officially named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, which is what enables later figures about the sector to be compared at all. None of it guaranteed commercial success, and regulatory attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry. It did, shift short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector big enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas was what that data showed four years later.
2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office
Nothing measures how far the format had come more clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. In China, short drama income came to 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, according to data released in mid-2025. That year marked the first time the sector earned more than China’s box office: a telling crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. More than 30,000 titles hit the market in 2024. Estimates put the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. That output is as revealing about the industry’s makeup as the revenue is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. It also implies heavy 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 marketing the same model abroad, as the overseas push had not waited for this milestone.
Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave
ReelShort went live in August 2022 and was first off the line. The app is operated by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox, developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, came next in April 2023. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, though no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech arrived in September 2024 with DramaWave, released 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 leads back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the recurring pattern. For people who watch dramas online in English, that corporate map is mostly invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Company | App | Link to China | Launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | China-based COL Group backs it | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | A subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly belongs to Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names seem to be one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Sits within 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; stake held by Fox Entertainment since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports or Western Originals
The strategic question, after the apps existed, became what to put in them. Per a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou responded by relying 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 were original overseas productions. In that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was pegged at $100,000 to $150,000. Since dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, it makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library. 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. In October 2024, TheWrap found that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; that audience, in other words, is well defined. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis sit in the catalogue of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also drawn in companies without them, most visibly Holywater, whose My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 together 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 differ in telling 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. 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 cite slightly different totals. Taking a broader view, Omdia estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also anticipates 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 expects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Its market-share estimates are the most revealing 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.
Where the Timeline Points Next
Lined up end to end, the milestones show a few clear patterns. The first pattern is about scale: the overseas business still looks small beside 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 places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, which points to the second pattern, a likely cooling of growth. Competition at the top has grown closer as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled into a familiar 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. 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 claim the next phase.
