A One-Handed Format: Duanju at Home
The story of Chinese short drama begins with a format rather than a single company. Duanju, the Chinese term that « short drama » translates literally, refers to vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone held fruit love island website in a single hand. A single title normally runs to 20 to 100 episodes, with each episode lasting between one and two minutes. The narratives rely on a reliable toolkit of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family feuds. Being easy to absorb in seconds matters for every one of those premises, because a whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. Conventional television seldom had to ask how to sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time, but seen as a business, the format solves exactly that question. The same product now reaches English-language audiences under other labels, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic threads through every stage of the timeline ahead.
2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre
Administrative rather than commercial: that is the nature of the first milestone. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, formally classified duanju as a genre. That step matters more than it might appear, because recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. A 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. None of it promised commercial success, and attention from a regulator can cut both ways for a young industry. What it did was nudge short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, that data pointed to a sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.
2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office
For a clear measure of how far the format had come, turn to the home-market figures for 2024. Figures published in mid-2025 put short drama revenue in China at 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 out-earned China’s box office. That year, studios released more than 30,000 titles. Over the same twelve months, the viewership was estimated at 662 million viewers. A business rolling out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale, so this volume reveals as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. It also points to intense competition, since every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Even so, the push abroad had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad.
Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox followed, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, though no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech arrived in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business; going by Sensor Tower’s data, its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. What recurs is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. That corporate map is mostly invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who instead see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Company | App | China connection | Launched |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backing from China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | A subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly under 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 | App owned by Kunlun Tech | Unconfirmed; top 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 vs. Western Originals
What to stock the apps with became the strategic question as soon as they existed. According to a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by leaning heavily on its domestic catalogue. It had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent of them were original overseas productions. According to the same report, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes clear sense for a company with an extensive domestic library, because it stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they cost more, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. This 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’s catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company maintains a production team in Los Angeles. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also drawn in companies without them, most visibly Holywater, whose My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 together with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: What Market Trackers Report
By 2025 the overseas business was being followed by several research firms, and their figures vary in telling 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. For the whole year, Sensor Tower’s data places 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. Omdia offers a wider view: it puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasts $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. Estimates from Media Partners Asia, reported in August 2026, put 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 forecasts $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. The most revealing figures for this timeline are MPA’s market-share estimates: about 29 percent outside China for ReelShort, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, roughly 69 percent in total for four apps with Chinese links.
Looking Ahead Along the Timeline
Lined up end to end, the milestones show a few patterns. The first is that the overseas business still looks small compared with 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. At the top, competition has grown closer too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled into a familiar shape, and a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by platform, country and promotion. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue exceeded $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, remains the product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase.