A One-Handed Format: Duanju at Home
Chinese short drama’s story starts with a format instead of a company. The Chinese word duanju, which “short drama” translates word for word, refers to vertical series framed at 9:16 for a handset held in one hand. Since episodes run one to two minutes, a single title generally needs 20 to 100 installments. A reliable stock of premises feeds the storylines: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family conflict and identity reveals. Each such setup can be absorbed in seconds, which is important when a complete episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. Viewed as a business, the format settles a question traditional reelshort free television rarely had to ask, specifically how to sell a story in fragments small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other terms under which English-speaking audiences now meet the same product. That pay-per-piece logic underlies every stage of the timeline below.
2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre
Administrative rather than commercial: that is how to describe the first milestone. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. The step is more important than it might seem: recognition turns a fuzzy category of online clips into something able to be classified, counted and supervised. Because a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, later numbers about the sector can be compared at all. Commercial success was not guaranteed by any of this, and for a young industry, attention from a regulator can cut both ways. The effect was to push short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, revealed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.
2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office
For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, turn to the home-market figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to data made public in mid-2025. That was the first year the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a headline crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was pegged at 662 million viewers. Studios released more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. That sheer volume reveals as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing ideas at scale. It also implies fierce competition, since every one of those titles is vying 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 offering the same model abroad by 2024.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave
ReelShort launched in August 2022 and was first out of the gate. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio 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. In June 2023 GoodShort arrived under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a less solid source. Besides 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been formally announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech came in 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. Again and again, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronts 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 | App name | Link to China | Launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backing from 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 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 | A unit of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech’s own app | Not officially confirmed; highest global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | None; Fox Entertainment stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports or Western Originals
Once the apps existed, the strategic question became what to put in them. According to a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by leaning heavily on its home 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. Per the same report, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals cost more: TheWrap cites $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Yet they reach the audience without a translation layer. This audience is well defined: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis sit in the library of DramaBox, which runs a production team in Los Angeles. The originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots, most prominently Holywater, whose My Drama app secured an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 along with a Fox commitment to make 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 vary in useful ways. The United States supplied 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of global in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower pegged 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 quote slightly different totals. Omdia offers a broader view: it puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $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. Media Partners Asia, in estimates reported in August 2026, put 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 projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. The most revealing figures for this timeline are MPA’s market-share estimates: about 29 percent outside China for ReelShort, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, roughly 69 percent in total for four apps with Chinese links.
Reading the Timeline Into the Future
A few patterns emerge when the milestones are laid end to end. The first is that the overseas business still looks limited beside its origin, since 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 on year. At the top, competition has tightened too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter. 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 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. No matter whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product remains what duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.