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A One-Handed Format: Duanju Where It Began

The account of Chinese short drama starts with a format rather than a single company. “Short drama” is the literal translation of duanju, a word that describes vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one hand. Since episodes run one to two minutes, a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 installments. The storylines are drawn from a proven set of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family conflict and hidden-identity reveals. Each one of those setups can be understood in seconds, and that is important because a whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. Commercially speaking, www.reelshorts.org the format tackles a question that regular television seldom faced: how do you sell a story in fragments small enough to price one at a time. English-language viewers now encounter the same product under other tags, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the timeline ahead.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

The first milestone is regulatory rather than commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially recognized duanju as a genre. That move counts more than it might seem, because recognition turns a fuzzy category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. A genre with a name can be followed from one year to the next, which is what enables later data about the sector to be compared at all. None of it ensured commercial success, and a regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry. Its effect was to move 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 revealed four years later.

2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office

The domestic numbers for 2024 are the most obvious measure of how far the format had come. Numbers published in mid-2025 put short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. That year marked the first time the sector brought in more than China’s box office: a telling crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was put at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles hit the market over the same twelve months. Because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale, that output says as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. It also points to fierce competition: every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The overseas push had not, however, waited for this milestone; a number of Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad by 2024.

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

First to launch was ReelShort, which debuted in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, runs the app, and China-based COL Group stands behind the studio. In April 2023 DramaBox arrived, developed 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 tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a less solid source. Alongside 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. DramaWave, published through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, was the company’s entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. 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 recurring pattern. 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.

Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals

After the apps existed, the strategic question became what to put on them. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its domestic library. 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. Per the same report, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes good sense for a company with a rich domestic library, because it stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals cost more: TheWrap cites $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Yet they reach the audience without a translation layer. This audience is distinct: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. Series such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis appear in the catalogue of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also drawn in firms without them, most visibly 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 Market Trackers Report

By 2025 the overseas business was being tracked by several research firms, and their figures vary in instructive ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, of which the United States contributed 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Sensor Tower’s data puts full-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, though different reports of the same dataset cite slightly different totals. Omdia offers a broader view, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasting $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, 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 expects $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: 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 Into the Future

Lined up end to end, the milestones reveal a few patterns. First, the overseas business still looks modest compared with its origin: Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, which points to the second pattern, a likely slowing of growth. Among the leaders, competition has grown tighter too: DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in 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 including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, though prices vary by platform, country 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, which makes production the area most likely to change next. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, remains the product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase.