A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market
Chinese short drama’s history begins with a format and not with a company. The Chinese word duanju, which “short drama” translates literally, describes vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. With episodes lasting between one and two minutes, a single title typically reelshort movies website stretches across 20 to 100 installments. The plots lean on a dependable, well-worn menu of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, identity reveals and family conflict. Being easy to absorb in seconds counts for every one of those setups, because a whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. Commercially speaking, the format resolves a question that traditional television hardly ever had to ask: how do you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. The same product now greets English-language audiences under other labels, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Each stage of the timeline ahead is linked by that pay-per-piece logic.
2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map
The earliest milestone is regulatory, not a commercial one. In 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. Since recognition converts a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, the step matters more than it might appear. Since a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, later statistics about the sector can be compared at all. For a nascent industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways, and none of this assured commercial success. Short drama was pushed from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector big enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters was what that data showed four years later.
2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office
The domestic numbers for 2024 are the plainest measure of how far the format had come. According to data made public in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a landmark crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. That year, the audience was put at 662 million viewers. Production companies rolled out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. A business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale, so that volume says as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. Every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also signals fierce competition. Still, the drive overseas had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave
ReelShort launched in August 2022 and was first out of the gate. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. Next up came DramaBox in April 2023. It is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, is its owner. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a shakier source. Jiuzhou Culture launched 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 officially announced. DramaWave, published through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, was the company’s entry in September 2024, and the company’s FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. What keeps recurring 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 mostly invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Operator | App | Chinese link | Debut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Supported by 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; the two names appear to be a single 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 | Not confirmed; topped global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No Chinese link; Fox Entertainment has held a stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports or Western Originals
With the apps in place, the strategic question turned to what to put in them. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, relied heavily on its domestic catalogue. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had made for overseas markets were dubbed Chinese adaptations, and 20 percent were original overseas productions. The same report placed the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. 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 cost more to make, with TheWrap reporting $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. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox lists titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its library. Most visibly, Holywater shows that the originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots; its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025, plus a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers’ Numbers
Multiple research firms were monitoring the overseas business by 2025, and their estimates diverge in instructive ways. Sensor Tower put worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps at about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States supplying 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Over the full year, Sensor Tower’s data places 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 broader view comes from Omdia, which estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion earned outside China, and projects $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. Estimates 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 puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it projects $1.05 billion, 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, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, or roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.
Reading the Timeline Into the Future
When the milestones are laid end to end, several patterns stand out. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which gives the first pattern: the overseas business still looks small next to its origin. The second is a likely easing of growth, with Sensor Tower placing 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. Monetization has taken on a familiar shape, and a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by country, platform and promotion. DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, which makes production the area most likely to change next. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, stays the product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase.
