A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju at Home

It is a screen format, not a corporation, that begins the story of Chinese short drama. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, describes vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. Each episode lasts between one and two minutes, while a single title usually runs to 20 to 100 instalments. A trusty set of premises supplies the plots: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family feuds and identity reveals. Being understandable in seconds matters for every one of those premises, shorts reels short film because an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb moves on. In business terms, the format tackles a question that conventional television rarely needed to ask: how do you sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. English-speaking audiences now meet the same product under other labels, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the timeline ahead.

2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre

It’s an administrative milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, duanju was officially acknowledged as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. That step counts more than it might seem, because recognition transforms a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. An officially named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, which is what allows later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. For a fledgling industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. Short drama was pushed from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, the data revealed a sector large enough to stand comparison against the country’s cinemas.

2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

Nothing measures how far the format had come more clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to numbers released in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. Producers released more than 30,000 titles in 2024. Figures placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. Because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale, that volume reveals as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. It also points to intense competition: every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The push abroad had not, however, waited for this milestone; several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.

Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave

First out of the gate was ReelShort, which launched in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, manages the app, and China-based COL Group stands behind the studio. DramaBox came next in April 2023; it is made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly linked 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 another name, though no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech arrived in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. What recurs is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. What people who watch dramas online in English actually see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; the corporate map is mostly invisible from where they sit.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

The key strategic question, after the apps existed, was what to put in them. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its home library. 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 prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes clear sense for a company with a rich domestic library. Western originals are more expensive: TheWrap puts them at $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Yet 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, which shows that this audience is well defined. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company maintains a production team in Los Angeles. Most visibly, 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, plus a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Show

By 2025 the overseas business was being followed by several research firms, and their figures differ in instructive ways. Sensor Tower pegged worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps at about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Different reports of the same dataset cite slightly different totals, but for the full year Sensor Tower’s data places in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent. Omdia offers a broader view, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasting $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. Media Partners Asia put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031 in estimates reported in August 2026. MPA puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and expects $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 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 Into the Future

Several patterns stand out when the milestones are set end to end. First, the overseas business still looks limited next to its origin: Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. Second, growth is likely easing: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year. DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter, which means competition at the top has tightened as well. Prices vary by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has settled into a familiar shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. Production is the part of the business most likely to change next: DramaWave, whose annualized revenue exceeded $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly creates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. Regardless of whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output come out on top in the next phase, the product stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.