Watch ReelShort Originals Now Full 2026 Guide

A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju on Home Soil

Chinese short drama’s history opens with a screen format instead of a firm. Taken literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it covers vertical series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Since episodes run one to two minutes, a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 instalments. The plots draw on a dependable, well-worn toolkit of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family feuds and hidden-identity reveals. Being understandable in seconds counts for every one reelshorts.org/where-to-watch/watch-out-i-m-the-lady-boss of those premises, because an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. From a business angle, the format tackles a question that conventional television hardly ever had to ask: how does one sell a story in fragments small enough to price one at a time. The very same product now reaches English-speaking audiences under other labels, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Every stage of the timeline below is connected by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

It’s an administrative milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. This move is more important than it might seem: recognition turns a loose category of online clips into something able to be classified, counted and supervised. Later figures about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next. For a nascent industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. The effect was to push short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector big enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters 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, turn to the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China hit 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures published in mid-2025. It was the first year the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a telling crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. In 2024, studios released more than 30,000 titles. Over the same twelve months, the audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. Because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale, that output reveals as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. It also signals intense competition, since every one of those titles is vying 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 marketing the same model abroad by 2024.

Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Behind the Export Wave

First out of the gate was ReelShort, which launched in August 2022. The app is run by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is backed by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox arrived, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. In June 2023 GoodShort launched under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly linked 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 the evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under another name, even though no rename has been officially announced. DramaWave, released through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. Again and again, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong stands in front of a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. That corporate map is largely invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals

What to stock the apps with became the strategic question after they existed. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, leaned heavily on its domestic catalogue. It had made 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 according to the same report. Dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious 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 citing $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, so that audience is specific. DramaBox runs a production team in Los Angeles, and its catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. The originals market has also pulled in companies without Chinese roots, most prominently Holywater, whose My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 along with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers’ Numbers

By 2025 the overseas business was being followed by several research firms, and their figures vary in revealing 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. Across 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. Taking a wider view, Omdia puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. For 2026, Omdia also projects the US to reach $1.5 billion, 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 estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it expects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. MPA’s market-share estimates are the most instructive for this timeline: 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 Forward

Put the milestones end to end and a number of patterns become clear. The first pattern is one of scale: the overseas business still looks small next to its origin, as 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 tighter too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has taken on a consistent 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 country, platform and promotion. The area most likely to change next is production, since 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 win the next phase, the product remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.