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A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market

Rather than a company, the story of Chinese short drama starts with a screen format. The word duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, denotes vertical-format series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. An episode plays for from one to two minutes, while a single title typically stretches across 20 to 100 instalments. The stories draw on a dependable set of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family strife. A whole episode has to connect before the viewer’s thumb https://shortsreels.org/ moves on, so it counts for a lot that each of those premises can be grasped in seconds. How can you sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time? Regular television rarely had to ask that question, but seen as a business, the format solves it. Under different names, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-language audiences now find the same product. Across every stage of the timeline below, this pay-per-piece logic is the thread.

2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre

It is a regulatory milestone, not a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. Since recognition turns a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, the step matters more than it might appear. An officially named genre can be followed from one year to the next, which is what allows later data about the sector to be compared at all. For a fledgling industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. What recognition did was nudge short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years afterward, that data revealed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

Nothing captures how far the format had come more clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures published in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a landmark crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. Production companies rolled out more than 30,000 titles in 2024. Estimates placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. The volume is as revealing about the industry’s makeup as the revenue is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. It also implies intense competition, since 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 selling the same model abroad.

Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave

ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox came next in April 2023; it is made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. In June 2023 GoodShort debuted under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a thinner 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 a different name, even though no rename has been officially announced. Kunlun Tech arrived in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business, 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 repeating pattern. Most of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: all they notice is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

With the apps in place, the strategic question turned to what to put in them. According to a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by drawing 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 according to the same report. Dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes clear sense for a company with a deep domestic library. While 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. 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. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox lists titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its library. Companies without Chinese roots have also been pulled into the originals market. The best-known is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, along with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Report

Several research firms were tracking the overseas business by 2025, and their figures diverge in instructive ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States contributing 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 cite slightly different totals. A wider view comes from Omdia, which puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, including $3 billion earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia placed 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 and expects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in its work is more telling for this timeline than its 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

When the milestones are laid end to end, several patterns emerge. 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 next to its origin. 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 on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. As DramaBox and ReelShort each bringing in about $140 million in that quarter, the contest at the top has tightened as well. Monetization has settled on a familiar 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. What is most likely to change next is production, because 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. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product is still the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.