A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began

Chinese short drama’s story opens with a format and not with a corporation. The Chinese word duanju, which “short drama” renders literally, names vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. Individual episodes run from one to two minutes, and a single title normally stretches across 20 to 100 instalments. A dependable toolkit of premises feeds the stories: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family conflict. Being graspable in seconds counts for each of those setups, because an entire episode has to hit home before the dramaonline viewer’s thumb scrolls on. Conventional television rarely had to ask how to sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time, yet viewed as a business, the format solves exactly that question. That same product now reaches English-language audiences under other labels, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Across every stage of the timeline below, that pay-per-piece logic is the common thread.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

Administrative rather than commercial: that is how to describe the first milestone. In 2020, duanju was formally recognized as a genre by the Chinese regulator, the NRTA. Recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised, which is why this move matters more than it might appear. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is possible, and that is what lets later figures about the sector to be compared at all. For a nascent industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. What it did was nudge short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, the data revealed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

For a clear measure of how far the format had come, look at the domestic figures for 2024. In China, short drama takings came to 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, according to data published in mid-2025. For an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes, it was a landmark crossover: the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office. Estimates put the audience that year at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles came out over the same twelve months. That volume says as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does, because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing ideas at scale. The volume also implies fierce 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 selling the same model abroad, since the overseas push had not waited for this milestone.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox came next in April 2023; it is built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly connected 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, together with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been officially announced. DramaWave, released through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. What recurs is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong in front of a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. Most 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

After the apps existed, the strategic question became what to stock them with. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its home library. 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. For a company with a rich domestic library, dubbing makes plain sense, because it extends the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals cost more: 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. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox carries titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its catalogue. Most prominently, Holywater shows that the originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots; its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025, plus 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 differ in instructive ways. The United States contributed 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 cite slightly different totals, but for the full year Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent. Taking a wider 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. Omdia also anticipates the US to climb to $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia, in estimates reported in August 2026, pegged 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 forecasts $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, 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.

Looking Ahead Along the Timeline

Lay the milestones end to end and several patterns become clear. The first pattern is about scale: the overseas business still looks modest next to its origin, because Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second pattern is that growth is likely slowing, 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 tightened as well. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has settled into a familiar shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. Production is the area most likely to change next: 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. What is being sold stays the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output claim the next phase.