A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began
Instead of a firm, the story of Chinese short drama starts with a format. The Chinese word duanju, which “short drama” translates literally, refers to vertical series framed at 9:16 for a handset held in chinese short drama one hand. With episodes running between one and two minutes, a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 instalments. A proven toolkit of premises feeds the storylines: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family conflict and hidden-identity reveals. A complete episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on, so it helps a great deal that each of those premises can be grasped in seconds. Commercially speaking, the format answers a question that regular television rarely faced: how does one sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. Under other labels, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-speaking audiences now meet the same product. Each stage of the timeline that follows is held together by this pay-per-piece logic.
2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing
The first milestone is bureaucratic rather than commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. Since recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, the step matters more than it might appear. Later statistics about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next. None of this promised commercial success, and regulatory attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry. Recognition did, however, push short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, the data revealed a sector big enough to stand comparison against the country’s cinemas.
2024: The Year Short Drama Out-Earned the Box Office
The figures from inside China for 2024 are the plainest measure of how far the format had come. In China, short drama revenue reached 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, according to figures published in mid-2025. It was the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office, a headline crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. Producers put out more than 30,000 titles in 2024. Figures put the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. Because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale, that volume says as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. The volume also implies intense competition: every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad, since the push abroad had not waited for this milestone.
Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, going live in August 2022. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox followed in April 2023; it is built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a weaker source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under another name, even though no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech joined the market in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business; going by Sensor Tower’s data, its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. What keeps recurring is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting 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.
| Operator | Service | Chinese tie | Debut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | China-based COL Group backs it | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | A Singapore subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly a part of Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names appear to be one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Part of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | App owned by Kunlun Tech | Not confirmed; led global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | None at all; Fox Entertainment equity stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals
The strategic question, once the apps existed, became what to fill them with. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, relied heavily on its home catalogue. It had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. The same report set the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Since dubbing prolongs the life of titles already paid for, it makes clear 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. That audience is specific: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox runs a production team in Los Angeles, and its catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Most prominently, Holywater shows that the originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots; its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025, along with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers’ Numbers
By 2025 several research firms were following the overseas business, and their figures differ in instructive ways. In the first quarter of 2025, global 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 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. Omdia offers a wider view, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and predicting $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, which would be half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia, in estimates reported in August 2026, placed revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. MPA pegs 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, or roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.
Reading the Timeline Forward
Line up the milestones end to end and a number of patterns emerge. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which points to the first pattern: the overseas business still looks small next to its origin. 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. Competition at the top has grown closer as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has taken on a familiar shape. As of September 2026, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, though prices vary by platform, country and promotion. The area most likely to change next is production, because 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. What is being sold is still the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.