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A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju Where It Began

Rather than a company, the history of Chinese short drama begins with a format. Translated literally, the Chinese term duanju means „short drama”, and it refers to vertical series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Episodes run from one to two minutes, and a single title typically stretches across 20 to 100 chapters. Writers’ storylines come from a dependable kit of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, www.reelshorts.org hidden-identity reveals and family conflict. Every one of those setups can be grasped in seconds, which is important when a whole episode has to make its point before the viewer’s thumb moves on. From a business angle, the format tackles a question that traditional television rarely had to ask: how can you sell a story in fragments small enough to price one at a time. Under different names, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-language audiences now encounter the same product. Every stage of the timeline below is linked by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

The opening milestone turns out to be administrative, not a commercial one. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. That step carries more weight than it might look: recognition converts a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. A named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, which is what lets later figures about the sector to be compared at all. Commercial success was not guaranteed by any of this, and for a new industry, attention from a regulator can cut both ways. The effect was to push short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, showed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

Nothing measures how far the format had come as clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China hit 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures released in mid-2025. That year marked the first time the sector out-earned China’s box office: a landmark crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. More than 30,000 titles hit the market in 2024. Figures placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. A business rolling out tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale, so that volume says as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. The volume also points to intense competition: every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad, as the push abroad had not waited for this milestone.

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

ReelShort came first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. Behind the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is backed by China-based COL Group. Then came DramaBox in April 2023. Its developer is Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, a company reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, together with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, although no rename has been formally announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech joined the field 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. 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 largely invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals

What to fill the apps with became the strategic question once they existed. According to a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by leaning heavily on its domestic 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. That same report placed the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Because dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been paid for, it makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals are more expensive, 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 lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company maintains a production team in Los Angeles. The originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots, most prominently Holywater, whose My Drama app received 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 Market Trackers Report

The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures differ 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 estimated at about $700 million. Across the whole year, Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent; different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals. A wider view comes from Omdia, which puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, including $3 billion earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is the amount Omdia also projects the US to reach in 2026. Estimates from Media Partners Asia, reported in August 2026, placed revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. MPA puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it expects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. MPA’s market-share estimates are the most revealing for this timeline: 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

When the milestones are placed end to end, several patterns stand out. The first point is about scale: the overseas business still looks modest next to its origin, as 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 over year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. With DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter, the contest at the top has tightened as well. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on a familiar 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. 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, so production is the area most likely to change next. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, remains the product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.