A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began
Chinese short drama’s tale opens with a screen format and not with a company. Translated literally, the Chinese term duanju means “short drama”, and it refers to upright series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. With episodes lasting one to two minutes, a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 installments. The storylines pull from a reliable menu of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, reveals of identity and family feuds. Each one of those premises can be grasped in seconds, and that is crucial because an entire episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb reelshorts.org/where-to-watch/after-a-one-night-stand-i-was-targeted-by-my-boss moves on. Considered as a business, the format settles a question ordinary television hardly ever had to ask, specifically how to sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time. English-language audiences now find the same product under other terms, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Each stage of the timeline ahead is held together by that pay-per-piece logic.
2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre
It is a regulatory milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, officially recognized duanju as a genre. This move matters more than it might appear, because recognition converts a fuzzy category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. An officially named genre can be followed from one year to the next, which is what allows later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. For a young industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways, and none of this assured commercial success. Short drama was pushed from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, that data showed a sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.
2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office
The domestic figures for 2024 are the plainest measure of how far the format had come. According to data released in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. That year marked the first time the sector earned more than China’s box office: a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. Producers put out more than 30,000 titles that year. Over the same twelve months, the audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. The volume is as revealing about the industry’s makeup as the revenue figure is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. The volume also points to intense competition: every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad, since the overseas push had not waited for this milestone.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, arriving in August 2022. It is operated by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox, developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, followed in April 2023. 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 weaker source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under another name, even though no rename has been officially announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech came in with DramaWave, released 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 keeps recurring is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong in front of a business whose capital or parentage traces 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.
| Company behind it | App | China connection | Launch date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | China-based COL Group backs it | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | 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; 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 app | Not confirmed; led global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No link; Fox Entertainment has held a stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports or Western Originals
With the apps in place, the strategic question became what to put in them. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, leaned heavily on its home catalogue. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had created for overseas markets 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. Dubbing stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Western originals cost more: TheWrap puts them at $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Still, they reach the audience without a translation layer. That audience is well defined: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox’s lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company operates a production team in Los Angeles. The originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots, most prominently Holywater, whose My Drama app received 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: The Market Trackers’ Numbers
The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their estimates differ in instructive ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps reached about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, of which the United States contributed 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 places in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent. Omdia takes a wider view: it estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is what Omdia also expects the US to reach in 2026. 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. ReelShort’s revenue comes to $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, MPA’s market-share estimates are the most revealing: 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.
Where the Timeline Points Next
Laid end to end, the milestones show a few clear patterns. The first is that the overseas business still looks modest beside its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second pattern is that growth is likely cooling, as Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter, so competition at the top has tightened as well. Prices vary by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on a recognizable 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 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 take the next phase.