A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju at Home

The account of Chinese short drama begins with a screen format rather than a company. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, refers to vertical series set at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Episodes last one to two minutes, and a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 chapters. The plots rely on a trusty stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family feuds and identity reveals. Every one of those setups can be understood in seconds, which is important when short drama channel a complete episode has to connect before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. How can you sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time? Regular television hardly ever had to ask that question, but considered as a business, the format settles it. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other labels under which English-speaking audiences now come across the same product. Across every stage of the timeline below, this pay-per-piece logic is the common thread.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

The earliest milestone is bureaucratic rather than commercial. In 2020, the NRTA, the Chinese regulator, officially classified duanju as a genre. Since recognition turns a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, that step matters more than it might seem. Because a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, later numbers about the sector are able to be compared at all. Commercial success was not guaranteed by any of this, and for a young industry, attention from a regulator can cut both ways. The effect was to shift 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 cinemas was what that data showed four years later.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook 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 revenue came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, going by data published in mid-2025. That year marked the first time the sector out-earned China’s box office: a symbolic crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. More than 30,000 titles were released in 2024. Over the same twelve months, the viewership was placed at 662 million viewers. That output is as telling about the industry’s makeup as the revenue is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. It also signals stiff competition, since every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Even so, the overseas push had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort went live in August 2022 and was first off the line. It is run by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox came next in April 2023; it is made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, a company reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. Besides 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 joined the field with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. The repeating pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. Most 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 Versus Western Originals

Once the apps were in place, the big strategic question shifted to what to stock them with. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its home 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. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 by the estimate of the same report. Dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Western originals are more expensive: TheWrap quotes $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Yet they reach the audience without a translation layer. TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US, so that audience is well defined. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox lists titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its library. 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 along with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Show

By 2025 the overseas business was being followed by several research firms, and their figures differ in useful ways. The United States contributed 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of global in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower pegged at about $700 million. Different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals, but for the full year Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent. A wider view comes from Omdia, which puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, including $3 billion earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, which would be half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia, in estimates reported in August 2026, put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. MPA estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, its market-share estimates are the most telling: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, then DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.

Looking Ahead Along the Timeline

Several patterns stand out when the milestones are laid end to end. 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 is a likely slowing of growth, with Sensor Tower putting the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. The race at the top has tightened as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on a familiar 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. DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, which makes production the area most likely to change next. The product 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.