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A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju at Home

The history of Chinese short drama starts with a viewing format rather than a company. Rendered literally, the Chinese term duanju means “short drama”, and it describes vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Since episodes run between one and two minutes, a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 installments. The plots rely on a trusty kit of premises: tales of revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family The Billionaire’s Contract Lover online strife. Each of those setups can be absorbed in seconds, which matters when an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. Seen as a business, the format solves a question regular television hardly ever had to ask, in other words how to sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time. The very same product now greets English-language audiences under other terms, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic connects every stage of the chronology that follows.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

It’s a regulatory milestone, not a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. Because recognition turns a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, that step matters more than it might appear. A named genre can be followed from one year to the next, which is what enables later figures about the sector to be compared at all. Commercial success was not assured by any of this, and for a young industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways. What recognition did was push short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years afterward, that data showed a sector big enough to be measured against the country’s film theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, look at the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China climbed to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to data released in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a landmark crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. More than 30,000 titles hit the market that year. The audience over the same twelve months was put at 662 million viewers. Since a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale, that volume reveals as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. The volume also implies fierce competition: every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The overseas push had not, however, waited for this milestone; a number of Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. Behind the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox followed in April 2023; it is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. Singapore New Reading Technology launched GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a less solid source. In addition to 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been officially announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name. 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. What recurs is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong in front of a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. That corporate map is largely invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals

With the apps in place, the big strategic question turned to what to stock them with. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its domestic library. It had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent of them were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent of them were original overseas productions. The same report set the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes obvious sense for a company with a deep domestic library, because it extends the life of titles that have already been paid for. Although Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, 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, which shows that this audience is specific. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company operates a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been pulled into the originals market. The most prominent is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app secured an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, together with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Say

By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures vary in telling ways. The United States contributed 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower put at about $700 million. Sensor Tower’s data puts whole-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, although different reports of the same dataset quote slightly different totals. Taking a broader view, Omdia estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $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 projects the US to reach in 2026. Media Partners Asia placed 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 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. The most revealing 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, roughly 69 percent in total for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Ahead

Laid end to end, the milestones show several patterns. The first pattern is one of scale: the overseas business still looks small next to its origin, as 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 closer as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has settled into a recognizable 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. What is most likely to change next is production, since 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. 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.