A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil
Instead of a corporation, the story of Chinese short drama starts with a screen format. “Short drama” is the literal translation of duanju, a term for vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. Since episodes last between one and two minutes, a single title usually takes 20 to 100 installments. The plots rely on a trusty set of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family feuds and hidden-identity reveals. All of these setups can be followed in seconds, which counts for a lot when a complete episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. Commercially reelshort free streaming speaking, the format answers a question that regular television hardly ever faced: how does one sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. Under different names, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-speaking audiences now meet the same product. Every stage of the timeline ahead is held together by this pay-per-piece logic.
2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official
Administrative rather than commercial: that is the nature of the earliest milestone. In 2020, duanju was officially acknowledged as a genre by the Chinese regulator, the NRTA. Recognition turns a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, which is why this move matters more than it might seem. Since a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, later statistics about the sector are able to be compared at all. Commercial success was not assured by any of this, and for a fledgling industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways. What it did do was shift short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector large 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
For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, consider the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to data made public in mid-2025. That was the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. Estimates put the audience that year at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles hit the market over the same twelve months. The volume is as revealing about the industry’s makeup as the revenue is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. Stiff competition is implied too, as every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. However, the drive overseas had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad.
Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave
The first mover was ReelShort, which launched in August 2022. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, came next in April 2023. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a less solid source. Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, though no rename has been formally announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech entered with DramaWave, which it published through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower the company’s FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. What recurs is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. What people who watch dramas online in English actually see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; that corporate map is largely invisible from where they sit.
| Operating company | Service | Chinese link | Launched |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Supported by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | Subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly part of Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; both names appear to belong to one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | A unit of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech’s own app | Not officially confirmed; top global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No link; stake held by Fox Entertainment since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals
What to fill the apps with became the strategic question as soon as they existed. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its home library. Of the more than 600 mini-dramas made for overseas markets, 20 percent were original overseas productions, while about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations. In the same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was pegged at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes good sense for a company with a large domestic library, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals are more expensive: TheWrap quotes $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Still, they reach the audience without a translation layer. Back in October 2024, TheWrap found that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; that audience, in other words, is specific. DramaBox has a production team in Los Angeles, and its catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Companies without Chinese roots have also been attracted to the originals market. The most prominent is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, together with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: What Market Trackers Report
By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures vary in telling ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps was estimated at 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 cite 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. Taking a wider 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. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is what Omdia also projects the US to reach in 2026. Estimates from Media Partners Asia, 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 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, then DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, for a combined share of roughly 69 percent for four apps with Chinese links.
Reading the Timeline Ahead
A number of patterns stand out when the milestones are laid end to end. The first point is one of scale: the overseas business still looks small next to its origin, because Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. 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 grown tighter as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Prices vary by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has settled into a familiar shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $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 win the next phase, the product stays what duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.