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A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju at Home

Rather than a corporation, the story of Chinese short drama starts with a format. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” translates literally, describes vertical series framed at 9:16 for a handset held in one hand. A single title generally extends over 20 to 100 installments, with episodes lasting between one and who is Cayman Cardiff two minutes. The plots come from a dependable stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, identity reveals and family conflict. Being graspable in seconds counts for every one of those setups, because an entire episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. Viewed as a business, the format answers a question regular television hardly ever had to ask, specifically how to sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. Under other labels, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-language audiences now find the same product. This pay-per-piece logic is the thread woven through every stage of the timeline below.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map

The earliest milestone is administrative, not commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. That move matters more than it might look, because recognition turns a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. A genre with a name can be tracked from one year to the next, which is what allows later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. None of it ensured commercial success, and attention from a regulator can cut both ways for a new industry. It did, however, move short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, the data showed a sector large enough to stand comparison against the country’s cinemas.

2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

The figures from inside China for 2024 are the most obvious measure of how far the format had come. Numbers published in mid-2025 placed short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. It was the first year the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a landmark crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. The audience that year was estimated at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, production companies rolled out more than 30,000 titles. That output is as telling 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. It also points to intense competition, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The drive abroad, 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 Driving the Export Wave

ReelShort came first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, manages it, and China-based COL Group supports the studio. DramaBox, developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, followed in April 2023. Singapore New Reading Technology brought out GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, along with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been officially announced. DramaWave, published through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, was the company’s entry in September 2024, and the company’s FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The recurring pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. That corporate map is mostly invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who instead see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

What to put in the apps became the strategic question as soon as they existed. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its domestic library. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had produced for overseas markets, about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 according to the same report. Because dubbing prolongs the life of titles already paid for, it makes clear sense for a company with a deep domestic library. While Western originals cost more, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, they reach the audience without a translation layer. That audience is specific: in October 2024, TheWrap reported 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. Companies without Chinese roots have also been pulled into the originals market. The most prominent is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, together with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What Market Trackers Report

By 2025 the overseas business was being tracked by several research firms, and their figures diverge in instructive ways. According to Sensor Tower, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, of which the United States contributed 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 quote slightly different totals. A wider view comes from Omdia, which puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. For 2026, Omdia also projects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. Estimates from Media Partners Asia, 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. ReelShort’s revenue stands at $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. MPA’s market-share estimates are the most revealing for this timeline: ReelShort at 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 Forward

When the milestones are placed end to end, several patterns stand out. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which points to the first pattern: the overseas business still looks small next to its origin. Second, growth is likely cooling: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year. With DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter, the contest at the top has grown closer as well. Prices vary by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on 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. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly creates 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 take the next phase.