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A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil

It’s a screen format, not a company, that opens the story of Chinese short drama. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, stands for vertical shows composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. The episodes last one to two minutes, and a single title generally extends across 20 to 100 episodes. Writers’ plots are drawn from a reliable set of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family conflict. A whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away, so it matters that every one of those setups can be grasped in seconds. Seen as a business, the format solves a question traditional television rarely had to ask, reelshort online specifically how to sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. English-speaking audiences now encounter the same product under other names, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Each stage of the timeline ahead is connected by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

Administrative rather than commercial: that is the nature of the earliest milestone. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, formally recognized duanju as a genre. Since recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, that step matters more than it might seem. Later data about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next. Business success was not ensured by any of this, and for a young industry, attention from a regulator can cut both ways. The effect was to move short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters was what that data showed four years later.

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

How far the format had come is measured most clearly by the home-market numbers for 2024. According to data published in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For the first time, the sector earned more than China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. The audience that year was estimated at 662 million viewers. Producers put out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. The volume is as informative about the industry’s structure as the revenue is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. Every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also signals stiff competition. The push abroad had not, however, waited for this milestone; several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.

Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave

The first mover was ReelShort, which went live in August 2022. It is managed by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is backed 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. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a weaker source. Alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been officially announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name. DramaWave, released through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The pattern that keeps recurring is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting for a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. For people who watch dramas online in English, that corporate map is mostly invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals

As soon as the apps existed, the strategic question became what to fill them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer 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. The same report set the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. For a company with a rich domestic library, dubbing makes plain sense, because it prolongs the life of titles already paid for. Western originals cost more, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but 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 well defined. Series such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis sit in the library of DramaBox, which runs a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been attracted to the originals market. The most visible is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, along with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Show

By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures vary in telling 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 supplying 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 cite slightly different totals. Omdia offers a broader 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 projects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, or half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia placed 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 expects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. The most revealing figures for this timeline are its market-share estimates: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, followed by DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.

Where the Timeline Points Next

When the milestones are laid end to end, several patterns stand out. First, the overseas business still looks modest beside its origin: 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 over year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. As DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter, competition at the top has grown closer as well. Monetization has taken on a familiar shape, and a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by platform, country and promotion. The area most likely to change next is production, since 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. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.