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A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju at Home

Instead of a corporation, the story of Chinese short drama begins with a screen format. “Short drama” is the literal translation of duanju, a term for vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. An episode plays for between one and two minutes, while a single title usually runs to 20 to 100 installments. The plots rely on a proven set of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family feuds. A complete episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb moves on, so it helps a great deal that each of those premises can be grasped in seconds. Traditional television rarely had to reel short ask how to sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time, but viewed as a business, the format answers exactly that question. That same product now greets English-language audiences under other labels, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the chronology below.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

The opening milestone is administrative, not commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. Recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised, which is why the step matters more than it might seem. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is possible, and that is what lets later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. For a nascent industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. What it did was push short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, the data showed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, consider the home-market figures for 2024. Numbers published in mid-2025 placed short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For the first time, the sector out-earned China’s box office, a landmark crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was pegged at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, studios rolled out more than 30,000 titles. This volume says as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does, because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale. The volume also points to intense competition: every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The overseas push had not, however, waited for this milestone; several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad by 2024.

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

ReelShort came first out of the gate, arriving in August 2022. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox came next, developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. In June 2023 GoodShort debuted under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, plus 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, although no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech joined in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app led 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. Most of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

What to put in the apps became the strategic question once they existed. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, leaned heavily on its home catalogue. Of the more than 600 mini-dramas made for overseas markets, 20 percent were original overseas productions, while about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations. That same report put the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. For a company with a deep domestic library, dubbing makes clear sense, because it extends the life of titles already paid for. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Back in October 2024, TheWrap found that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; the audience, in other words, is specific. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox carries titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its catalogue. Companies without Chinese roots have also been pulled into the originals market. The most visible is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, plus a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What Market Trackers Report

By 2025 several research firms were following the overseas business, and their figures vary in instructive ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps was estimated at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the whole 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 give slightly different totals. Omdia takes a broader view: it estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and predicts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia pegged 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 its 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.

Where the Timeline Points Next

When the milestones are placed end to end, several patterns emerge. The first point is about scale: the overseas business still looks modest next to its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second pattern is that growth is likely cooling, as Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. As DramaBox and ReelShort each bringing in about $140 million in that quarter, competition at the top has grown closer as well. Monetization has settled into a familiar shape. As of September 2026, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, though prices vary by platform, country and promotion. What is most likely to change next is production, since 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. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, remains the core offer whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.