A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began

The history of Chinese short drama begins with a viewing format rather than a firm. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” translates literally, names vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Every episode lasts between one and two minutes, while a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 episodes. Writers’ storylines are drawn from a dependable kit of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family feuds and hidden-identity reveals. Being graspable in He’s Too Late for Her Mafia Majesty short drama seconds is important for each of those premises, because an entire episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. Traditional television rarely had to ask how to sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time, yet viewed as a business, this format settles exactly that question. Viewers in English-speaking markets now find the same product under other names, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic connects every stage of the timeline ahead.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map

The first milestone is regulatory, not commercial. In 2020, duanju was formally acknowledged as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. The step counts more than it might look, because recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. Since a named genre can be followed from one year to the next, later statistics about the sector are able to be compared at all. None of this promised commercial success, and a regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a new industry. The effect was to push short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, the data revealed a sector large enough to stand comparison against the country’s movie theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

The home-market figures for 2024 are the sharpest measure of how far the format had come. In China, short drama takings came to 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, according to data published in mid-2025. That year marked the first time the sector brought in more than China’s box office: a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. Figures put the viewership that year at 662 million viewers. Producers rolled out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. That volume reveals as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing ideas at scale. It also implies heavy competition, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad, because the overseas push had not waited for this milestone.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. Behind the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox followed, 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, although that parent link rests on a less solid source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under another name, even though no rename has been formally announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech came in with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. The repeating pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting 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 to them.

Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals

Once the apps existed, the strategic question became what to fill them with. According to a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by drawing heavily on its domestic 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. The same report said, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes plain sense for a company with a deep domestic library, because it extends 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 carries titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its catalogue. Most prominently, 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, along with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers’ Numbers

A number of research firms were monitoring the overseas business by 2025, and their figures differ in instructive ways. The United States contributed 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower put at about $700 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. In 2026, Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. 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 puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it forecasts $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, MPA’s market-share estimates are the most instructive: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, then 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 Into the Future

When the milestones are lined up end to end, several patterns emerge. 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 slowing of growth. DramaBox and ReelShort each earned 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 recognizable shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. The area most likely to change next is production, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, stays the product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.