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A One-Handed Format: Duanju in Its Home Market

The account of Chinese short drama opens with a format rather than a firm. “Short drama” is the literal translation of duanju, a term for vertical series framed at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one hand. Since episodes last between one and two minutes, a single title usually needs 20 to 100 episodes. A proven kit of premises drives the storylines: billionaire and CEO Meg Bush series romance, revenge plots, family conflict and hidden-identity reveals. Each one of those setups can be understood in seconds, and that is important when a whole episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb moves on. Considered as a business, the format settles a question conventional television seldom had to ask, namely how to sell a story in portions small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are some of the other terms under which English-speaking audiences now meet the same product. Each stage of the timeline that follows is tied together by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre

It’s a regulatory milestone, not a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, duanju was officially acknowledged 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 supervised, the step matters more than it might seem. A genre with a name can be tracked from one year to the next, which is what lets 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 moved from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, that data showed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Out-Earned the Box Office

For a clear measure of how far the format had come, turn to the domestic figures for 2024. According to figures released in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. It was the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. The audience that year was put at 662 million viewers. Studios put out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. That sheer volume says as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. It also signals fierce competition, since every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The push abroad had not, however, waited for this milestone; several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad by 2024.

Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering 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 supported by China-based COL Group. Next came DramaBox in April 2023. It is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. In June 2023 GoodShort launched under Singapore New Reading Technology; the company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a less solid source. Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, though no rename has been officially announced. Kunlun Tech joined the market in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business; according to Sensor Tower, its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. What recurs is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. That corporate map is mostly invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who instead see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

Once the apps existed, the strategic question became what to stock them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its home 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. In that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was put at $100,000 to $150,000. Since dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, it makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library. Although Western originals cost more, with TheWrap quoting $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, so that audience is specific. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox carries titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its library. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also drawn in firms without them, most visibly 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: The Market Trackers’ Numbers

By 2025 the overseas business was being tracked by several research firms, and their figures differ in instructive ways. In the first quarter of 2025, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps was estimated at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States accounting for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Sensor Tower’s data puts full-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, though different reports of the same dataset quote slightly different totals. Taking a wider view, Omdia puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, which would be half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 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. ReelShort’s revenue stands at $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: 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.

Where the Timeline Points Next

When the milestones are placed end to end, several patterns stand out. The first is that the overseas business still looks small compared with its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. 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 suggests the second pattern, a likely slowing of growth. The contest at the top has grown tighter as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. The way these apps make money has settled into a familiar shape: for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026, although prices vary by country, platform and promotion. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $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 claim the next phase, the product remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.