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A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil

The history of Chinese short drama starts with a format rather than a company. Taken literally, the Chinese term duanju comes out as „short drama”, and it refers to vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Since episodes last between one and two minutes, a single title generally needs 20 to 100 installments. Writers’ plots come from a reliable set of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, reveals of identity and family strife. Being graspable in seconds is important for each of those setups, because an entire episode has to land before the https://reelshortwebsite.com/ viewer’s thumb swipes away. In business terms, the format resolves a question that regular television hardly ever faced: how can you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. English-language audiences now find the same product under other names, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Every stage of the timeline that follows is held together by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map

It’s a regulatory milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. That step carries more weight than it might seem: recognition transforms a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. Because a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, later numbers about the sector are able to be compared at all. A regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a new industry, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. Short drama was moved from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, the data revealed a sector large enough to be compared against the country’s cinemas.

2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

The domestic figures for 2024 are the clearest measure of how far the format had come. Short drama revenue in China reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to data published in mid-2025. It marked the first time the sector out-earned China’s box office: a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. Figures placed the audience that year at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles arrived over the same twelve months. That output is as informative about the industry’s structure as the revenue figure is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. It also suggests stiff competition, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. However, the overseas push had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, arriving in August 2022. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, came next in April 2023. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly tied 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 another name, although no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech joined in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. Again and again, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong stands in front of a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. That corporate map is largely invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

Once the apps existed, the strategic question became what to fill them with. Per a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou responded by relying heavily on its domestic catalogue. Of its more than 600 mini-dramas made for overseas markets, 20 percent were original overseas productions, while about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 by the estimate of the same report. Dubbing makes good sense for a company with an extensive domestic library, because it stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. This audience is specific: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company operates a production team in Los Angeles. The originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots, most visibly 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 Market Trackers Report

The overseas business had drawn the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures diverge in revealing ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps reached about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Over the full year, Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent; different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals. Omdia offers a broader view: it puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it 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. Figures from Media Partners Asia, reported in August 2026, placed 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 expects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. The most telling figures for this timeline are 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.

Reading the Timeline Into the Future

When the milestones are laid end to end, a few 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 beside its origin. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, which points to the second pattern, a likely cooling of growth. 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 recognizable shape: for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026, although prices vary by country, platform and promotion. Production is the part of the business most likely to change next: DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly creates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. What is being sold stays the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output claim the next phase.