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A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market

Instead of a corporation, the story of Chinese short drama begins with a format. Taken literally, the Chinese term duanju comes out as “short drama”, and it refers to upright series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. A single title generally extends over 20 to 100 episodes, with each episode running one to two minutes. A proven set of premises drives the storylines: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, reveals of identity and family conflict. A whole episode has to connect before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on, freedramashorts.com so it counts for a lot that each of those premises can be absorbed in seconds. Viewed as a business, the format addresses a question ordinary television hardly ever had to ask, namely how to sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other names under which English-language audiences now encounter the same product. Every stage of the timeline that follows is connected by this pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

The first milestone turns out to be administrative, not commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially recognized duanju as a genre. Recognition converts a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised, which is why that step matters more than it might appear. Following 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. Nothing about this ensured commercial success, and a regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry. The effect was to move short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, pointed to a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

The home-market figures for 2024 are the clearest measure of how far the format had come. Figures released in mid-2025 placed short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. That was the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office, a headline crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. The audience that year was estimated at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles came out over the same twelve months. That output is as informative about the industry’s structure as the revenue figure is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. Stiff competition is implied too, since every one of those titles competes for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The overseas push, however, had not waited for this milestone, and by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort launched in August 2022 and was first off the line. It is managed by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox followed in April 2023; it is built 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 linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, though no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech entered in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. What keeps recurring is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting 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.

Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals

What to put in the apps became the strategic question as soon as they existed. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its domestic library. 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. That same report placed the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. For a company with a deep domestic library, dubbing makes clear sense, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. 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. That 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 operates a production team in Los Angeles. Chinese roots are not universal: 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 produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What Market Trackers Report

By 2025 several research firms were following the overseas business, and their figures diverge 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. Across the whole year, Sensor Tower’s data places in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent; different reports of the same dataset cite slightly different totals. Omdia offers a wider view, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and predicting $14 billion by the end of 2026. For 2026, Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia pegged revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. MPA estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. The most telling figures for this timeline are MPA’s market-share estimates: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, then 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

Put the milestones end to end and several patterns stand out. The first is that the overseas business still looks small beside 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 places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, which points to the second pattern, a likely cooling of growth. DramaBox and ReelShort each took in about $140 million in that quarter, which means competition at the top has grown closer as well. Prices vary 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. 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. 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 take the next phase.