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A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju on Home Soil

Rather than a company, the story of Chinese short drama starts with a format. The word duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, refers to vertical series composed at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one hand. A single title normally stretches across 20 to 100 installments, with each episode running one to two minutes. The stories lean on a dependable, well-worn kit of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family feuds and hidden-identity reveals. A micro drama complete episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb moves on, so it matters that every one of those setups can be grasped in seconds. Commercially speaking, the format resolves a question that traditional television hardly ever needed to ask: how do you sell a story in fragments small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are some of the other terms under which English-language audiences now come across the same product. That pay-per-piece logic threads through every stage of the timeline below.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

The earliest milestone is regulatory rather than commercial. In 2020, duanju was formally acknowledged as a genre by the Chinese regulator, the NRTA. Since recognition turns a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, that 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 figures about the sector to be compared at all. Regulatory attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry, and none of this assured commercial success. Recognition did, however, push short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters is what that data showed four years later.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

The domestic numbers for 2024 are the plainest measure of how far the format had come. According to data made public in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. It marked the first time the sector earned more than China’s box office: a landmark crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. More than 30,000 titles came out that year. The audience over the same twelve months was pegged at 662 million viewers. A business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale, so this volume reveals as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. It also points to heavy competition, since every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The international push, however, had not waited for this milestone, and by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad.

Moving Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave

ReelShort was first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. Then came DramaBox in April 2023. Beijing Dianzhong Technology develops it, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, is its owner. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a less solid 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. DramaWave, released through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and the company’s FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. Again and again, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronts a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. Much of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: all they notice is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

Once the apps were in place, the strategic question became what to put in them. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its home library. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had created for overseas markets were dubbed Chinese adaptations, and 20 percent were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 by the estimate of the same report. Since dubbing prolongs the life of titles already paid for, it makes obvious sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they are more expensive, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. 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. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox lists titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its library. Companies without Chinese roots have also been attracted to 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 produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Say

By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures vary in instructive ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States supplying 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the full year, Sensor Tower’s data places in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, and different reports of the same dataset quote slightly different totals. Taking a broader view, Omdia puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasts $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. 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 published in August 2026. MPA puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it projects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. The most revealing figures for this timeline are MPA’s market-share estimates: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, followed by 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

Several patterns become clear when the milestones are set 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. The second pattern is that growth is likely slowing, as Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter, which means competition at the top has grown closer as well. The way these apps make money has settled into a familiar 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 generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, so production is the area most likely to change next. No matter whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase, the product stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.