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

Rather than a corporation, the story of Chinese short drama starts with a screen format. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, denotes vertical shows composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Since episodes run one to two minutes, a single title typically stretches across 20 to 100 installments. The storylines lean on a proven toolkit of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family conflict. An entire episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb moves on, so reel shorts streaming it helps a great deal that each of those premises can be grasped in seconds. Conventional television rarely had to ask how to sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time, but viewed as a business, the format solves exactly that question. English-language audiences now come across the same product under other names, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic is the thread running through every stage of the timeline below.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

The earliest milestone turns out to be administrative, not commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. That step matters more than it might look: recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something able to be classified, counted and overseen. Following 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. A regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry, and nothing about this guaranteed commercial success. Short drama was shifted 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 was what that data showed four years later.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

Nothing captures how far the format had come as clearly than 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. That year marked the first time the sector out-earned China’s box office: a landmark crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. Figures placed the viewership that year at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, producers released more than 30,000 titles. This volume reveals as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. It also implies fierce competition: 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 offering the same model abroad.

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

First out of the gate was ReelShort, which went live in August 2022. Behind the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox arrived next in April 2023; it is built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. Singapore New Reading Technology brought out GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though 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 a different name, even though no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech arrived 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 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 mostly invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals

What to fill the apps with became the strategic question once they existed. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its domestic library. Of the more than 600 mini-dramas produced for overseas markets, 20 percent were original overseas productions, while about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations. Per the same report, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes clear sense for a company with a deep domestic library, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap reporting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but 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 specific. DramaBox maintains a production team in Los Angeles, and its library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. The originals market has also pulled in companies without Chinese roots, most notably Holywater, whose My Drama app took 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: What the Market Trackers Say

A number of research firms were tracking the overseas business by 2025, and their figures diverge 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 accounting for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Different reports of the same dataset quote slightly different totals, but for the full year Sensor Tower’s data places in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent. Omdia takes a broader 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 hit $1.5 billion in 2026, which would be half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia 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; for 2026 it projects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. MPA’s market-share estimates are the most instructive for this timeline: 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.

Reading the Timeline Forward

Laid end to end, the milestones show a few clear patterns. 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 modest beside its origin. The second is a likely easing of growth, with Sensor Tower placing the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. Competition at the top has tightened as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled on a familiar shape, and a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by country, platform and promotion. The area most likely to change next is production, since 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. No matter whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product is still what duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.