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

The story of Chinese short drama starts with a format rather than a single company. Rendered literally, the Chinese term duanju comes out as “short drama”, and it covers vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Every episode runs between one and two minutes, while a single title usually runs to 20 to 100 instalments. The storylines lean on a proven kit of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, reveals of identity vertical video streaming and family feuds. Being easy to absorb in seconds counts for each of those premises, because a whole episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb moves on. Looked at as a business, the format answers a question conventional television hardly ever had to ask, that is, how to sell a story in portions small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other terms under which English-speaking audiences now encounter the same product. Every stage of the timeline ahead is linked by this pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

The opening milestone is regulatory rather than commercial. In 2020, duanju was formally acknowledged as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. This move counts more than it might seem, because recognition converts a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised. A named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, which is what lets later data about the sector to be compared at all. A regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a new industry, and none of this assured commercial success. Recognition did, however, shift 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 is what that data revealed four years later.

2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

The domestic figures for 2024 are the plainest measure of how far the format had come. In China, short drama revenue reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures published in mid-2025. It marked 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, the audience was put at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles came out over the same twelve months. That output is as revealing about the industry’s makeup as the revenue is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. The volume also implies intense competition: every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The overseas push had not, however, waited for this milestone; several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, going live in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, manages it, and China-based COL Group backs the studio. DramaBox, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, came next in April 2023. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a thinner source. Alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been formally announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name. DramaWave, released through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. Over and over, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronts a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. Much of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: all they notice is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals

The key strategic question, after the apps existed, was what to stock them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its domestic catalogue. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had created for overseas markets 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. Dubbing makes plain sense for a company with a large domestic library, because it extends 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. In October 2024, TheWrap found that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; the audience, in other words, is specific. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox offers titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its library. Most notably, 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, plus a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers’ Numbers

By 2025 several research firms were following the overseas business, and their figures vary in instructive ways. According to Sensor Tower, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps reached 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 give 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 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. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is the amount Omdia also expects the US to reach in 2026. Figures 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 pegs ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, MPA’s market-share estimates are the most revealing: 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 Into the Future

Line up the milestones end to end and a few patterns become clear. The first is that the overseas business still looks modest 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 on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter, so competition at the top has tightened as well. 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 such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. What is most likely to change next is production, since 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. What is being sold stays the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase.