A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju Where It Began
Chinese short drama’s history starts with a screen format rather than a firm. “Short drama” is the literal translation of the Chinese term duanju, which describes vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. The episodes run one to two minutes, and a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 episodes. Writers’ plots come from a dependable stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family conflict and hidden-identity reveals. Being graspable in seconds matters for each of those premises, because an entire episode has My Mafia Love to register before the viewer’s thumb moves on. Looked at as a business, the format settles a question regular television rarely had to ask, specifically how to sell a story in portions small enough to price one at a time. English-speaking audiences now come across the same product under other names, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Across every stage of the timeline that follows, this pay-per-piece logic is the connecting thread.
2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map
The first milestone is administrative rather than commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. The step is more important than it might appear: recognition transforms a loose category of online clips into something able to be classified, counted and supervised. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is feasible, and that is what enables later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. Regulatory attention can cut both ways for a young industry, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. What it did do was nudge short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, the data revealed a sector big enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.
2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office
Nothing measures how far the format had come as clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China climbed to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to numbers published in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a landmark crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. That year, studios put out more than 30,000 titles. Over the same twelve months, the viewership was put at 662 million viewers. The volume is as revealing about the industry’s structure as the revenue is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. Every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also points to intense competition. However, the overseas push 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
The first mover was ReelShort, which debuted in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, manages it, and China-based COL Group stands behind the studio. Next up came DramaBox in April 2023. Beijing Dianzhong Technology develops it, and StoryMatrix, the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, is its owner. Singapore New Reading Technology brought out GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a less solid source. Jiuzhou Culture launched 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 formally announced. Kunlun Tech joined the market in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business; going by Sensor Tower’s data, 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. What people who watch dramas online in English actually see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; that corporate map is largely invisible from where they sit.
| Company behind it | App | Chinese link | Launch date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Supported by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | A 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; both names appear to belong to one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Belongs to Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech app | Not confirmed; highest global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | None; stake held by Fox Entertainment since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals
After the apps were in place, the strategic question turned to what to put in them. Per a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by leaning heavily on its domestic catalogue. The company had produced more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent of them were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 in the view of the same report. For a company with a rich domestic library, dubbing makes clear sense, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals cost more: TheWrap quotes $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 specific: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox runs a production team in Los Angeles, and its catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Companies without Chinese roots have also been pulled into the originals market. The most prominent is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app secured an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, plus a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers’ Numbers
Multiple research firms were tracking the overseas business by 2025, and their figures differ in revealing ways. Sensor Tower put worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps at about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States supplying 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Across 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: 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. Omdia also projects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. Figures from Media Partners Asia, reported in August 2026, placed revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. MPA estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it expects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. Its market-share estimates are the most revealing for this timeline: about 29 percent outside China for ReelShort, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, or roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.
Looking Ahead Along the Timeline
When the milestones are laid end to end, several patterns emerge. The first is that the overseas business still looks small 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 slowing, 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. Competition at the top has tightened 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 including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by platform, country and promotion. 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, so production is the area most likely to change next. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output claim the next phase, the product remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.