A One-Handed Format: Duanju Where It Began

It’s a format, not a corporation, that opens the story of Chinese short drama. Rendered literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it refers to vertical series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. With episodes lasting between one and two minutes, a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 installments. The storylines are drawn from a reliable set of premises: billionaire drama box movies and CEO romance, revenge, family conflict and hidden-identity reveals. All of these setups can be followed in seconds, which matters when a complete episode has to connect before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. Looked at as a business, the format answers a question ordinary television seldom had to ask, that is, how to sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. English-language audiences now run into the same product under other tags, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Every stage of the timeline below is linked by this pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map

The earliest milestone is administrative rather than commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. This move counts more than it might appear, because recognition converts a fuzzy category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is feasible, and that is what allows later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. For a young industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. Short drama was shifted from the fringes 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 film theaters.

2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

Nothing shows how far the format had come more clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. Data released in mid-2025 placed short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. That year marked the first time the sector earned more than China’s box office: a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. Estimates placed the viewership that year at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, production companies put out more than 30,000 titles. That volume is as revealing about the industry’s makeup as the revenue is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. Intense competition is signaled too, as every one of those titles competes for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Still, the drive overseas had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.

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

The first mover was ReelShort, which debuted in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, runs the app, and China-based COL Group supports the studio. In April 2023 DramaBox came next, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced 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 entered in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, 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. For people who watch dramas online in English, that corporate map is mostly invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals

With the apps in place, the strategic question became what to stock them with. Per a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou responded by drawing heavily on its home catalogue. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had made for overseas markets were dubbed Chinese adaptations, and 20 percent were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 by the estimate of the same report. Dubbing makes plain sense for a company with a large domestic library, because it stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals cost more, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but they reach the audience without a translation layer. This audience is distinct: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company runs a production team in Los Angeles. The originals market has also pulled in companies without Chinese roots, most visibly Holywater, whose My Drama app secured 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 the Market Trackers Show

By 2025 the overseas business was being followed by several research firms, and their figures vary in instructive ways. The United States accounted for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of global in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower pegged at about $700 million. Different reports of the same dataset quote 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 offers 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 what Omdia also expects the US to reach in 2026. 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. ReelShort’s revenue comes to $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: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, then 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 Ahead

Line up the milestones end to end and several patterns emerge. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which points to the first pattern: the overseas business still looks small next to its origin. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, which points to the second pattern, a likely cooling of growth. Among the leaders, competition has grown tighter too: DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has taken on a familiar shape. As of September 2026, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, though prices vary by country, platform and promotion. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue exceeded $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly creates 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.