A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil
Chinese short drama’s history opens with a screen format and not with a company. “Short drama” is the literal translation of duanju, a term for upright series composed at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one hand. With episodes lasting between one and two minutes, a single title usually needs 20 to 100 installments. The plots are drawn from a reliable set of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, identity reveals and family strife. Every one of those setups can be understood in seconds, which is my-drama.org/series/the-homeless-wizard-of-wall-street important when a whole episode has to connect before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. As a business, the format tackles a question that regular television seldom 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 names under which English-speaking audiences now meet the same product. That pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the chronology ahead.
2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing
The earliest milestone is bureaucratic rather than commercial. Back in 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, which is why this move matters more than it might seem. Later figures about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be followed from one year to the next. Commercial success was not assured by any of this, and for a fledgling industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways. It did, however, move short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, the data showed a sector big enough to stand comparison against the country’s movie theaters.
2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office
The domestic numbers for 2024 are the clearest measure of how far the format had come. In China, short drama takings reached 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, according to figures released in mid-2025. That was the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. In 2024, producers put out more than 30,000 titles. Estimates placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. That output is as telling about the industry’s structure as the revenue is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. Intense competition is signaled too, because every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The push overseas, however, had not waited for this milestone, and by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave
ReelShort debuted in August 2022 and was first out of the gate. It is run by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is backed by China-based COL Group. Next came DramaBox in April 2023. Its developer is Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. In June 2023 GoodShort debuted under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a weaker source. Alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been formally announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name. Kunlun Tech joined the market in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business; going by Sensor Tower’s data, its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. A business whose capital or parentage traces back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the recurring pattern. What people who watch dramas online in English actually see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; the corporate map is largely invisible from where they sit.
| Operator | App name | Link to China | Launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Supported by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | 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; both names appear to belong to one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Belongs to Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech’s own app | Not officially confirmed; highest global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | None at all; Fox Entertainment has held a stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals
What to stock the apps with became the strategic question once they existed. Per a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou responded by relying heavily on its domestic catalogue. The company had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent of them were original overseas productions. The same report put the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes clear sense for a company with a deep domestic library. 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. In October 2024, TheWrap found that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; that audience, in other words, is well defined. Series such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis appear in the library of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. Chinese roots are not universal: the originals market has also attracted 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: What the Market Trackers Say
By 2025 several research firms were following the overseas business, and their figures differ in telling ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps stood at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States accounting for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals, but for the full year Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent. Taking a wider view, Omdia puts 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, in estimates 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. MPA pegs ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in MPA’s work is more telling for this timeline than its market-share estimates: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, roughly 69 percent in total for four apps with Chinese links.
Looking Ahead Along the Timeline
A few patterns stand out when the milestones are laid end to end. The first pattern is one of scale: the overseas business still looks modest beside its origin, as Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second pattern is that growth is likely slowing, as Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter, so competition at the top has grown closer as well. Monetization has settled into a consistent shape, and a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by platform, country and promotion. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue exceeded $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly creates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. Regardless of whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output come out on top in the next phase, the product stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.