A One-Handed Format: Duanju at Home

The tale of Chinese short drama begins with a screen format rather than a corporation. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, stands for vertical series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in Kidnapped by the Mafia drama one hand. Individual episodes run from one to two minutes, and a single title typically stretches across 20 to 100 chapters. The narratives build on a trusty toolkit of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family feuds and hidden-identity reveals. An entire episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb moves on, so it matters that each of those setups can be grasped in seconds. How can you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time? Regular television hardly ever had to ask that question, but viewed as a business, the format answers it. Under other labels, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-language audiences now meet the same product. Each stage of the timeline below is linked by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map

The first milestone is administrative, not commercial. In 2020, duanju was officially recognized as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. 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 appear. Following a named genre from one year to the next is feasible, and that is what lets later figures about the sector to be compared at all. None of this guaranteed commercial success, and a regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a new industry. What it did do was shift short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas was what that data revealed four years later.

2024: The Year Short Drama Out-Earned the Box Office

The domestic numbers for 2024 are the sharpest measure of how far the format had come. In China, short drama revenue reached 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, according to figures released in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector earned more than China’s box office, a telling crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. That year, producers put out more than 30,000 titles. Estimates placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. This volume tells as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. The volume also points to fierce competition: every one of those titles is fighting 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 marketing the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort came first out of the gate, arriving in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, runs the app, 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 appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, 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, along with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, although no rename has been officially announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech entered with DramaWave, which it published through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. The recurring pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting 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: what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

The key strategic question, once the apps existed, was what to stock them with. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, drew heavily on its home catalogue. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had produced for overseas markets were dubbed Chinese adaptations, and 20 percent were original overseas productions. That same report placed the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Since dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been paid for, it makes obvious sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Western originals are more expensive: TheWrap puts them at $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Still, they reach the audience without a translation layer. Back in October 2024, TheWrap found 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 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 notably 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: What the Market Trackers Show

By 2025 the overseas business was being tracked by several research firms, and their figures diverge in instructive ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps reached about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, of which the United States contributed 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the full year, Sensor Tower’s data places in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, and different reports of the same dataset quote slightly different totals. Taking a broader view, Omdia puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $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 what Omdia also expects the US to reach in 2026. Media Partners Asia, in estimates 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 comes to $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, its market-share estimates are the most telling: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, then DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, for a combined share of roughly 69 percent for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Into the Future

Lined up end to end, the milestones reveal several patterns. The first is that the overseas business still looks modest 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 on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. As DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter, competition at the top has grown closer as well. Monetization has settled into a familiar shape: across apps such as 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. Production is the area most likely to change next: 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, stays the core offer whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.