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A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market

Rather than a firm, the story of Chinese short drama starts with a screen format. Duanju, the Chinese term that «short drama» translates literally, refers to vertical-format series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single 100 Point Divorce Plan online hand. Individual episodes run one to two minutes, and a single title typically stretches over 20 to 100 chapters. The narratives draw on a trusty kit of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family conflict. Each of those setups can be understood in seconds, which counts for a lot when an entire episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. How do 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 settles it. That same product now meets English-speaking audiences under other labels, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Every stage of the timeline that follows is tied together by this pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

It’s an administrative milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Recognition transforms a vague category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised, which is why the step matters more than it might seem. An officially named genre can be tracked 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 young industry, and nothing about this assured commercial success. Recognition did, however, shift short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, the data revealed a sector big enough to stand comparison against the country’s movie theaters.

2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

For a clear measure of how far the format had come, consider the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to numbers published in mid-2025. For an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a landmark crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. The viewership that year was placed at 662 million viewers. Production companies rolled out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. The volume is as revealing about the industry’s structure as the revenue figure is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. Intense competition is suggested too, because every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Even so, the overseas push had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, arriving in August 2022. It is run by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is supported by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox arrived, developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a thinner 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 a different name, although no rename has been officially announced. Kunlun Tech arrived in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business; according to Sensor Tower, its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. Over and over, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong stands in front of a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. That corporate map is mostly invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

What to put in the apps became the strategic question once they existed. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, leaned heavily on its domestic catalogue. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had produced for overseas markets, about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. In that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was pegged at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes obvious sense for a company with an extensive domestic library, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals are more expensive: TheWrap cites $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Yet 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; that audience, in other words, is specific. DramaBox’s lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company operates a production team in Los Angeles. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also attracted firms without them, most visibly Holywater, whose My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 along 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 monitored by several research firms, and their figures differ in revealing ways. According to Sensor Tower, worldwide 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. Sensor Tower’s data puts full-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, though different reports of the same dataset cite slightly different totals. Omdia offers a wider view, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projecting $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to climb to $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. For ReelShort, MPA puts revenue at $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. The most telling 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, or roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.

Looking Ahead Along the Timeline

Several patterns become clear when the milestones are set 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 is a likely easing of growth, with Sensor Tower placing the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. Competition at the top has grown tighter as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. The way these apps make money has settled into a familiar 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. 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, which makes production the area most likely to change next. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase, the product stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.