The Cold Ceo Who Spoiled Series Guide Free Episodes Inside
A One-Handed Format: Duanju on Home Soil
The account of Chinese short drama opens with a viewing format rather than a firm. The word duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, stands for vertical series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. Since episodes last between The Cold Ceo Who Spoiled Me Online one and two minutes, a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 episodes. Writers’ storylines are drawn from a proven kit of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family conflict and identity reveals. Being understandable in seconds is important for every one of those premises, because an entire episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. How do you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time? Conventional television hardly ever had to ask that question, but viewed as a business, the format solves it. English-language viewers now encounter the same product under other names, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Each stage of the timeline below is tied together by this pay-per-piece logic.
2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map
The earliest milestone is regulatory rather than commercial. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. Since recognition turns a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, the step matters more than it might appear. Later figures about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next. None of this guaranteed commercial success, and attention from a regulator can cut both ways for a new industry. It did, however, shift short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, that data pointed to a sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s film theaters.
2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office
Nothing captures how far the format had come more clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. Figures released 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 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 audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. This volume reveals as much about the industry’s shape as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing ideas at scale. Every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also signals intense competition. Still, the drive overseas had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.
Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Behind the Export Wave
First to launch was ReelShort, which went live in August 2022. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. Next came DramaBox in April 2023. Beijing Dianzhong Technology develops it, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. In June 2023 GoodShort debuted under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture rolled out 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. Kunlun Tech entered in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business; according to Sensor Tower, its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. 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. That corporate map is mostly invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Operator | App | China connection | Launch date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Supported by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | Singapore subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly a 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 | Sits within Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech’s own app | Unconfirmed; top global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No Chinese link; Fox Entertainment stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals
What to stock the apps with became the strategic question after they existed. Per a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou responded by relying heavily on its domestic catalogue. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had produced 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. Because dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been paid for, it makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Back in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; that audience, in other words, is specific. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox carries 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 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 the Market Trackers Show
By 2025 several research firms were following the overseas business, and their figures diverge in telling ways. In the first quarter of 2025, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States supplying 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the whole year, Sensor Tower’s data puts 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 offers a wider 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. Omdia also expects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, which would be half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031 in estimates published in August 2026. MPA estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it expects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, its market-share estimates are the most revealing: 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.
Where the Timeline Points Next
Several patterns emerge when the milestones are lined up 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 modest beside 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. Competition at the top has grown closer as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has taken on a recognizable 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 platform, country and promotion. What is most likely to change next is production, because 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. The product remains the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output claim the next phase.