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

Rather than a corporation, the history of Chinese short drama starts with a format. Taken literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it describes vertical series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. With episodes lasting between one and two minutes, a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 episodes. The stories pull watch Alpha’s Regret: Pregnant Rejected Luna from a proven toolkit of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, identity reveals and family strife. Being graspable in seconds is important for each of those setups, because a whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. In business terms, the format tackles a question that traditional television rarely faced: how does one sell a story in fragments small enough to price one at a time. That same product now reaches English-language audiences under other labels, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Every stage of the timeline below is held together by this pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

Regulatory rather than commercial: that is the nature of the first milestone. In 2020, duanju was officially recognized as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. Since recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, the step matters more than it might appear. Since a named genre can be followed from one year to the next, later numbers about the sector are able to be compared at all. Regulatory attention can cut both ways for a new industry, and nothing about this assured commercial success. Short drama was moved 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: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office

Nothing shows how far the format had come more clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. Numbers published in mid-2025 placed short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. That was the first year the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a headline crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. Producers rolled out more than 30,000 titles in 2024. Over the same twelve months, the viewership was put at 662 million viewers. That volume is as telling about the industry’s structure as the revenue is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. Every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also points to intense competition. Still, the push abroad had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox came next, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. Singapore New Reading Technology brought out GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a less solid source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under another name, even though no rename has been officially announced. Kunlun Tech joined in September 2024 with DramaWave, published 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 goes 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 Versus Western Originals

Once the apps existed, the strategic question became what to put in them. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, drew heavily on its domestic 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. The same report said, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. For a company with a rich domestic library, dubbing makes obvious sense, because it extends the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals are more expensive: TheWrap quotes $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. But they reach the audience without a translation layer. TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US, so that audience is specific. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company maintains a production team in Los Angeles. Most visibly, Holywater shows that the originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots; its My Drama app took 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 Say

By 2025 several research firms were monitoring the overseas business, and their figures vary in instructive ways. Sensor Tower put worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps at about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States accounting for 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 cite slightly different totals. Omdia takes a broader view, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and predicting $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. 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 published in August 2026. ReelShort’s revenue stands at $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in MPA’s work is more telling for this timeline than its market-share estimates: 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 Forward

Line up the milestones end to end and a few patterns become clear. 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 beside its origin. 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. DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter, so competition at the top has grown closer as well. Monetization has taken on a recognizable shape. As of September 2026, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, though prices vary by platform, country and promotion. 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, which makes production the area most likely to change next. 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 take the next phase.