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A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market

Chinese short drama’s history starts with a format instead of a corporation. “Short drama” is the literal translation of duanju, a term for upright series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. A single title normally spans 20 to 100 episodes, with episodes playing for between one and reel short app two minutes. A reliable set of premises underpins the storylines: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family conflict and hidden-identity reveals. Every one of those setups can be grasped in seconds, and that is crucial because an entire episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. Looked at as a business, the format addresses a question traditional television hardly ever had to ask, in other words how to sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are some of the other terms under which English-language audiences now meet the same product. Each stage of the timeline ahead is linked by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

The first milestone is regulatory rather than commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially recognized duanju as a genre. Because recognition turns a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, the step matters more than it might seem. A named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, which is what allows later data about the sector to be compared at all. Nothing about this ensured commercial success, and regulatory attention can cut both ways for a new industry. Recognition did, however, shift short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, that data pointed to a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

Nothing measures how far the format had come as clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures published in mid-2025. For an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a landmark crossover: the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office. That year, the audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. Studios put out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. Since a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale, that volume says as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. Fierce competition is signaled too, as every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The international push, however, had not waited for this milestone, and by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad.

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

First out of the gate was ReelShort, which went live in August 2022. The app is operated by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, came next in April 2023. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, a company reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a thinner source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, together with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been formally announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech joined the field with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower the company’s FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. A business whose capital or parentage leads back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the repeating pattern. What people who watch dramas online in English see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; that corporate map is largely invisible to them.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

As soon as the apps existed, the strategic question became what to put in them. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its domestic library. Of its more than 600 mini-dramas produced for overseas markets, 20 percent were original overseas productions, while about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations. In that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was placed at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library. While Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, they reach the audience without a translation layer. In October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; that audience, in other words, is specific. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company runs a production team in Los Angeles. Most prominently, Holywater shows that the originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots; its My Drama app received 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: What Market Trackers Report

The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their estimates diverge in telling ways. Sensor Tower estimated worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps at about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Different reports of the same dataset cite slightly different totals, but for the full year Sensor Tower’s data places in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent. Omdia takes a broader view: it estimates 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 projects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, or 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. ReelShort’s revenue stands at $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, MPA’s market-share estimates are the most instructive: 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

A number of patterns emerge when the milestones are laid end to end. First, the overseas business still looks small compared with its origin: 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 on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. The contest at the top has tightened as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. The way these apps make money has settled into a recognizable shape: for apps including 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. What is most likely to change next is production, since 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. No matter whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase, the product stays what duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.