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A One-Handed Format: Duanju Where It Began

Rather than a firm, the history of Chinese short drama begins with a format. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, refers to vertical series set at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. An episode runs one to two minutes, while a single title typically spans 20 to 100 instalments. A trusty set of premises feeds the plots: tales of revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity Found a Homeless Genius to Save My Company reveals and family strife. Being understandable in seconds is important for each of those premises, because an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. How can you sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time? Traditional television seldom had to ask that question, but viewed as a business, the format solves it. The very same product now reaches English-speaking audiences under other names, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Each stage of the timeline below is held together by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

The opening milestone turns out to be regulatory, not commercial. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, formally classified duanju as a genre. The step matters more than it might appear: recognition transforms a fuzzy category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. Because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, later figures about the sector are able to be compared at all. For a fledgling industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways, and none of this ensured commercial success. It did, shift short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, revealed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

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

How far the format had come is captured most clearly by the domestic figures for 2024. Data published in mid-2025 placed short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For the first time, the sector out-earned China’s box office, a telling crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. Estimates placed the viewership that year at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, production companies put out more than 30,000 titles. Since a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale, that output says as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. Fierce competition is signaled too, as every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Even so, the push abroad had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort went live in August 2022 and was first off the line. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, came next in April 2023. Singapore New Reading Technology brought out GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture launched 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 formally announced. Kunlun Tech arrived 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. The recurring pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong standing in front of a business whose capital or parentage goes 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.

Company behind it	App name	China connection	Launch date
Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California)	ReelShort	China-based COL Group backs it	August 2022
StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore)	DramaBox	A subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology	April 2023
Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd.	GoodShort	Reportedly belongs to Beijing New Reading Times	June 2023
SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong)	ShortTV / ShortMax	Jiuzhou Culture; the two names seem to be one app	September 2023
SKYWORK AI PTE LTD	DramaWave	Sits within Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business	September 2024
Kunlun Tech	FreeReels	App owned by Kunlun Tech	Not confirmed; topped global downloads in Q1 2026
Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020)	My Drama	No Chinese link; Fox Entertainment has held a stake since October 2025	Spring 2024

Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals

After the apps were in place, the strategic question turned to what to stock them with. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, leaned heavily on its domestic catalogue. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had created for overseas markets were dubbed Chinese adaptations, and 20 percent were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 according to the same report. Dubbing makes obvious sense for a company with a deep domestic library, because it stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they cost more, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. That audience is well defined: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox lists titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its library. 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, plus a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Report

By 2025 the overseas business was being monitored by several research firms, and their figures vary in useful ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States contributing 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 quote slightly different totals. Omdia offers a wider view: it estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and predicts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also anticipates the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. Figures from Media Partners Asia, reported in August 2026, put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. For ReelShort, MPA puts revenue at $785 million in 2025 and projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in its 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 Into the Future

Lay the milestones end to end and a few patterns stand out. First, the overseas business still looks small next to its origin: Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower places 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. Among the leaders, competition has grown closer too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned 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. 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. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase, the product is still the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.