A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil
It’s a format, not a company, that opens the history of Chinese short drama. “Short drama” is the literal translation of duanju, a label for vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one hand. The episodes run between one and two minutes, and a single title usually stretches over 20 to 100 episodes. The plots pull from a dependable, well-worn stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, reveals of identity and family strife. All of these setups can be understood in seconds, which matters when a complete episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb moves on. As a business, Lust and Redemption drama the format answers a question that conventional television rarely faced: how do you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are some of the other terms under which English-language audiences now encounter the same product. This pay-per-piece logic is the thread woven through every stage of the timeline that follows.
2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official
Regulatory rather than commercial: that is the nature of the earliest milestone. In 2020, duanju was officially recognized as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. The step matters more than it might seem, because recognition transforms a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is feasible, and that is what enables later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. A regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a new industry, and none of this assured commercial success. Short drama was moved from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector big enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters is what that data revealed four years later.
2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office
For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, consider the home-market figures for 2024. In China, short drama income reached 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, according to data released in mid-2025. That was the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office, a landmark crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. Studios released more than 30,000 titles that year. Over the same twelve months, the audience was placed at 662 million viewers. That output says as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. It also points to fierce competition: every one of those titles is competing 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 offering the same model abroad.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave
First out of the gate was ReelShort, which went live in August 2022. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox arrived next in April 2023; it is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly tied 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, together with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been formally announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech entered with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. The recurring pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting for a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. What people who watch dramas online in English actually see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; that corporate map is mostly invisible from where they sit.
| Company behind it | Service | China connection | Launch date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Supported by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | A Singapore subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly part of Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; both names appear to belong to one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Sits within Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | An app from Kunlun Tech | Not officially confirmed; topped global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No link; Fox Entertainment has held a stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals
The strategic question, after the apps existed, was what to fill them with. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, relied heavily on its domestic catalogue. Of the more than 600 mini-dramas made for overseas markets, 20 percent were original overseas productions, while about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations. 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 clear sense, because it extends the life of titles already paid for. Western originals cost more: TheWrap cites $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Still, 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. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox offers titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its library. The originals market has also pulled in companies without Chinese roots, most notably Holywater, whose My Drama app took 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: What the Market Trackers Report
Several research firms were monitoring the overseas business by 2025, and their numbers differ in instructive ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, worldwide 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. Sensor Tower’s data puts whole-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, though different reports of the same dataset cite slightly different totals. Omdia takes a wider view, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projecting $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also anticipates the US to hit $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. For this timeline, MPA’s market-share estimates are the most revealing: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, followed by 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.
Reading the Timeline Ahead
A number of patterns emerge when the milestones are set end to end. 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. 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. With DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter, competition at the top has grown closer as well. The way these apps make money has settled into a familiar shape: across apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026, though 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, which makes production the area most likely to change next. 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.
