A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju at Home

The history of Chinese short drama opens with a screen format rather than a corporation. Rendered literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it refers to upright series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Episodes last from one to two minutes, and a single title typically stretches across 20 to 100 instalments. Writers’ plots are built from a proven stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family feuds and watch The Lycan Queen Of Winter hidden-identity reveals. A whole episode has to connect before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on, so it counts for a lot that every one of those premises can be grasped in seconds. How do you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time? Regular television seldom had to ask that question, but considered as a business, the format answers it. The very same product now greets English-language audiences under other names, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the chronology that follows.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

The earliest milestone is administrative, not a commercial one. In 2020, duanju was officially acknowledged as a genre by the Chinese regulator, the NRTA. Because recognition turns a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, the step matters more than it might appear. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is possible, and that is what allows later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. Regulatory attention can cut both ways for a young industry, and nothing about this guaranteed commercial success. Short drama was pushed from the margins 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 Out-Earned the Box Office

The domestic numbers for 2024 are the clearest measure of how far the format had come. Data released in mid-2025 placed short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For the first time, the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a telling crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. The audience that year was placed at 662 million viewers. Producers put out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. A business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale, so this volume tells as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. Every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also signals stiff competition. However, the drive overseas had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, going live in August 2022. Behind the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox followed in April 2023; it is built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. Singapore New Reading Technology brought out GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a less solid source. Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, along with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, although no rename has been formally announced. DramaWave, released through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and the company’s FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The recurring pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting 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

What to stock the apps with became the strategic question after they existed. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its home catalogue. Of its more than 600 mini-dramas produced for overseas markets, 20 percent were original overseas productions, while about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 according to the same report. Dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious sense for a company with a rich domestic library. 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. 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 specific. Series 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 notably Holywater, whose My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 together with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Report

By 2025 the overseas business was being monitored by several research firms, and their figures differ in telling ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps stood at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States accounting for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the full year, Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, and different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals. Omdia offers a broader view, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and predicting $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. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia placed revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. ReelShort’s revenue comes to $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in MPA’s work is more telling for this timeline than its market-share estimates: ReelShort at 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

Put the milestones end to end and a few patterns stand out. 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 modest next to its origin. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, which points to the second pattern, a likely cooling of growth. Competition at the top has tightened 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 platform, country and promotion. DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, which makes production the area most likely to change next. The product stays the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase.