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

It is a format, not a company, that begins the history of Chinese short drama. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” renders literally, describes vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a phone https://www.reelshorts.org/ held in one hand. Each episode plays for from one to two minutes, while a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 episodes. The storylines rely on a dependable stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, identity reveals and family strife. Each such setup can be followed in seconds, which counts for a lot when a complete episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. How can you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time? Conventional television seldom had to ask that question, but seen as a business, the format answers it. The very same product now greets English-language audiences under other labels, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Across every stage of the timeline that follows, that pay-per-piece logic is the thread.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

Administrative rather than commercial: that is the nature of the earliest milestone. In 2020, duanju was officially recognized as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. This move is more important than it might appear: recognition transforms a fuzzy category of online clips into something able to be classified, counted and overseen. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is feasible, and that is what allows later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. Commercial success was not guaranteed by any of this, and for a young industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways. What it did do was move short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, that data revealed a sector big enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

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

How far the format had come is captured most clearly by the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China climbed to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to numbers published in mid-2025. That was the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office, a telling crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. Studios put out more than 30,000 titles in 2024. Figures placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. Since a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale, that output reveals as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. It also points to intense competition, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Still, the overseas push had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad.

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

First to launch was ReelShort, which launched in August 2022. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox arrived, made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. Singapore New Reading Technology launched 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 introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, together with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been officially announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech came in with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. A business whose capital or parentage traces back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the repeating pattern. 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 vs. Western Originals

Once the apps existed, the strategic question became what to stock them with. Per a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by leaning heavily on its domestic catalogue. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had made for overseas markets, about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. According to the same report, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes clear sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they cost more, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. That audience is clearly defined: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox operates a production team in Los Angeles, and its lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Chinese roots are not universal: the originals market has also drawn in firms 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

The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures differ in telling ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, 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 quote slightly different totals. Taking a broader view, Omdia estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it 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 projects the US to reach in 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 in estimates reported in August 2026. MPA puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it forecasts $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in its work is more telling for this timeline than its 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 number of patterns become clear when the milestones are lined up end to end. The first is that the overseas business still looks limited 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. Competition at the top has grown closer as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled into a recognizable shape: for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026, though prices vary by country, platform 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, so production is the area most likely to change next. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, stays the product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase.