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A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju at Home

Chinese short drama’s history opens with a screen format rather than a firm. Rendered literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it covers vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. A single title typically extends over 20 to 100 installments, with each episode lasting between one and two minutes. A reliable kit of premises supplies the storylines: billionaire and reelsshort.net CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family strife. Each one of those premises can be grasped in seconds, and that is crucial when a whole episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. From a business angle, the format resolves a question that conventional television seldom faced: how does one sell a story in fragments small enough to price one at a time. English-language audiences now meet the same product under other tags, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Every stage of the timeline below is tied together by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map

It is a regulatory milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, the NRTA, the Chinese regulator, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. That step matters more than it might look, because recognition transforms a fuzzy category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. Since a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, later numbers about the sector are able to be compared at all. Commercial success was not assured by any of this, and for a new industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways. It did, shift short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector large enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas was what that data revealed four years later.

2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office

For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, look at the domestic figures for 2024. According to data published in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China hit 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a landmark crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. More than 30,000 titles came out in 2024. Estimates placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. That output is as revealing about the industry’s makeup as the revenue figure is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. It also suggests stiff competition, since every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The overseas push had not, however, waited for this milestone; a number of Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad by 2024.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is backed by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox came next, made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a shakier source. Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, together with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, although 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. 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: what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals

As soon as the apps existed, the strategic question became what to fill them with. Per a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by leaning 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. In that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was placed at $100,000 to $150,000. Because dubbing prolongs the life of titles already paid for, it makes clear sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they are more expensive, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US, which shows that this audience is specific. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company maintains a production team in Los Angeles. The originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots, most notably 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: What the Market Trackers Say

The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures 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 accounting for 49 percent, or roughly $350 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 cite slightly different totals. Omdia offers a broader view: it puts 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. Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia, in estimates reported in August 2026, 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 at $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $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 with about 29 percent outside China, followed by DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, for a combined share of roughly 69 percent for four apps with Chinese links.

Looking Ahead Along the Timeline

When the milestones are placed end to end, several patterns stand out. The first is that the overseas business still looks modest compared with its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. Second, growth is likely cooling: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year. Among the leaders, competition has tightened too: DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has settled into a recognizable shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, so production is the area most likely to change next. No matter whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product is still what duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.