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

The account of Chinese short drama opens with a screen format rather than a firm. Rendered literally, the Chinese term duanju means “short drama”, and it covers vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. An episode runs one to two minutes, while a single title usually runs to 20 to 100 episodes. The stories rely on a dependable toolkit of https://www.reelshorts.org/ premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family conflict. A complete episode has to connect before the viewer’s thumb swipes away, so it matters that every one of those premises can be absorbed in seconds. Traditional television rarely had to ask how to sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time, but viewed as a business, this format settles exactly that question. Viewers in English-speaking markets now meet the same product under other names, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Each stage of the timeline below is connected by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

Administrative rather than commercial: that is how to describe the earliest milestone. In 2020, the NRTA, the Chinese regulator, officially classified duanju as a genre. That step matters more than it might look, because recognition converts a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised. An officially named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, which is what allows later figures about the sector to be compared at all. None of this ensured commercial success, and attention from a regulator can cut both ways for a new industry. The effect was to shift short drama from the margins 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 revealed four years later.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

The home-market figures for 2024 are the most obvious measure of how far the format had come. Short drama revenue in China reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to numbers published in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector out-earned China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. In 2024, producers released more than 30,000 titles. Over the same twelve months, the audience was placed at 662 million viewers. A business rolling out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale, so that output reveals as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. It also implies stiff competition, since 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 offering the same model abroad, because the push abroad had not waited for this milestone.

Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave

ReelShort was first out of the gate, going live in August 2022. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. Then came DramaBox in April 2023. It is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. Singapore New Reading Technology launched GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. Besides 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been formally announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name. Kunlun Tech joined in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The common thread is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. Most of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

The strategic question, once the apps existed, became what to stock them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its home catalogue. The company had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. The same report said, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. For a company with a rich domestic library, dubbing makes plain sense, because it extends the life of titles already paid for. Western originals cost more, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but they reach the audience without a translation layer. This 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. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis appear in the catalogue of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. Most visibly, 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 produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers’ Numbers

By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures diverge in instructive ways. The United States accounted for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower pegged at about $700 million. Sensor Tower’s data puts full-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, though different reports of the same dataset quote slightly different totals. A broader 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 expects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, 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 reported in August 2026. MPA pegs ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and expects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. The most telling figures for this timeline are MPA’s 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 Ahead

Laid end to end, the milestones reveal a few clear patterns. The first pattern is about scale: the overseas business still looks modest beside its origin, as Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second is a likely easing 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. DramaBox and ReelShort each took in about $140 million in that quarter, which means competition at the top has grown closer as well. Monetization has settled into a recognizable shape: across apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026, though prices vary by country, platform and promotion. Production is the part of the business most likely to change next: DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces 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 remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.