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A One-Handed Format: Duanju in Its Home Market
The account of Chinese short drama begins with a format rather than a corporation. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” renders literally, names vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a handset held in one hand. Episodes last one to two minutes, and a single title generally extends across 20 to 100 chapters. The plots pull from a proven set of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family conflict. Being graspable in seconds is important for each of those setups, because an entire reel shorts episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. Conventional television rarely had to ask how to sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time, but viewed as a business, this format answers exactly that question. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are some of 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 Formally Recognizes the Genre
Administrative rather than commercial: that is how to describe the first milestone. In 2020, the NRTA, the Chinese regulator, formally classified duanju as a genre. Recognition turns a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, which is why this move matters more than it might appear. Because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, later numbers about the sector can be compared at all. Business success was not guaranteed by any of this, and for a fledgling industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways. Recognition did, however, push short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, that data revealed a sector big enough to be measured against the country’s film theaters.
2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office
For a clear measure of how far the format had come, turn to the home-market figures for 2024. Data published in mid-2025 put short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For the first time, the sector earned 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. Over the same twelve months, studios rolled out more than 30,000 titles. That volume says as much about the industry’s shape as the revenue does, because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. Every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also signals intense competition. The push abroad had not, however, waited for this milestone; a number of Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad by 2024.
Moving Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, manages the app, and China-based COL Group backs the studio. DramaBox arrived next in April 2023; it is made 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, although that parent link rests on a less solid source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, along with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been officially announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech entered 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. 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. What people who watch dramas online in English see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; that corporate map is mostly invisible to them.
| Operating company | App | Chinese tie | Launched |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backed 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; the two names appear to be one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Belongs to Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | App owned by Kunlun Tech | Unconfirmed; top global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | None at all; Fox Entertainment stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports or Western Originals
The key strategic question, once the apps existed, became what to fill them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer leaned 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. Per the same report, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library. Although Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, they reach the audience without a translation layer. This audience is clearly defined: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox has a production team in Los Angeles, and its library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Most notably, Holywater shows that the originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots; its 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 Report
The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their estimates diverge in telling ways. Sensor Tower pegged worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps at about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States supplying 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Over the full year, Sensor Tower’s data places in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent; different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals. 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. In 2026, Omdia also projects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia pegged revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. For ReelShort, MPA puts revenue of $785 million in 2025 and projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. MPA’s market-share estimates are the most revealing for this timeline: 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
Laid end to end, the milestones show a few patterns. The first is that the overseas business still looks small beside its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. Second, growth is likely easing: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year. The race at the top has tightened as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled into a consistent shape, and a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by platform, country and promotion. Production is the part of the business most likely to change next: 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. Regardless of whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.