A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market

It is a screen format, not a company, that opens the story of Chinese short drama. The word duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, refers to vertical-format series framed at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one hand. Individual episodes play for from one to two minutes, and a single title typically stretches across 20 to 100 installments. The storylines are built from a reliable set of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family strife. A whole episode reel short has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away, so it helps a great deal that every one of those setups can be grasped in seconds. Conventional television seldom had to ask how to sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time, but seen as a business, the format settles exactly that question. English-language audiences now come across the same product under other tags, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Through every stage of the timeline below, that pay-per-piece logic is the thread.

2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre

The earliest milestone turns out to be regulatory, not a commercial one. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. This move matters more than it might look, because recognition converts a fuzzy category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is feasible, and that is what allows later figures about the sector to be compared at all. None of it guaranteed commercial success, and attention from a regulator 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. Four years later, the data showed a sector big enough to be compared against the country’s cinemas.

2024: The Year Short Drama Out-Earned the Box Office

For a clear measure of how far the format had come, turn to the home-market figures for 2024. In China, short drama income hit 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, going by data published in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a telling crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was pegged at 662 million viewers. Studios rolled out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. That volume tells as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does, because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. It also implies intense competition: every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The push abroad had not, however, waited for this milestone; a number of Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.

Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave

ReelShort came first out of the gate, going live in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, operates the app, and China-based COL Group stands behind the studio. DramaBox, developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, followed in April 2023. 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 weaker source. Alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been officially announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech entered with DramaWave, released 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 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; that corporate map is largely invisible from where they sit.

Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals

Once the apps were in place, the big strategic question shifted to what to stock them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its home catalogue. It had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent of them were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent of them were original overseas productions. The same report set the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Because dubbing extends the life of titles already paid for, it makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library. Although Western originals cost more, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, 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. DramaBox’s catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company operates a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been drawn into the originals market. The most visible is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app secured an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, along with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Show

The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their estimates differ in revealing ways. According to Sensor Tower, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps reached about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, of which the United States contributed 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. A broader view comes from Omdia, which estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, including $3 billion earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is what Omdia also expects the US to reach in 2026. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. For ReelShort, MPA puts revenue at $785 million in 2025 and projects $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, 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 Forward

Line up the milestones end to end and several patterns emerge. The first pattern is one of scale: the overseas business still looks small next to 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 puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, which suggests the second pattern, a likely cooling of growth. At the top, competition has tightened too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on a recognizable 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, because 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. Regardless of whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase, the product remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.