A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju Where It Began
It is a format, not a company, that begins the history of Chinese short drama. The Chinese term duanju, which "short drama" renders literally, refers to vertical series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. A single title normally stretches across 20 to 100 episodes, with each episode lasting between one and two minutes. Writers' plots are drawn from a proven set of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family feuds and hidden-identity reveals. Being understandable in seconds matters for each of those setups, because an entire episode has to land before the viewer's thumb swipes away. Seen as a business, the format settles a question regular television seldom had to ask, namely how reel short free to sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. That same product now greets English-speaking audiences under other terms, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the timeline below.
2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre
The opening milestone is administrative, not commercial. In 2020, duanju was formally recognized as a genre by the Chinese regulator, the NRTA. 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 appear. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is possible, and that is what enables later figures about the sector to be compared at all. Nothing about this assured commercial success, and a regulator's attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry. Recognition did, however, move short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, that data revealed a sector big enough to be measured against the country's movie theaters.
2024: The Year Short Drama Out-Earned the Box Office
For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, turn to the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to numbers 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. That year, the audience was pegged at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles were released over the same twelve months. That sheer volume reveals as much about the industry's structure as the revenue does, because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing ideas at scale. Fierce competition is implied too, since every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer's day. The push abroad had not, however, waited for this milestone; several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.
Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox came next in April 2023; it is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company's Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a less solid source. Besides 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 a different name. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech entered with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower the company's FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. A business whose capital or parentage leads back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the recurring pattern. For people who watch dramas online in English, that corporate map is largely invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Operator | App | Link to China | Launch date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backed by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | Singapore subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly part of Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names seem to be one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Belongs to Kunlun Tech's Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | App owned by Kunlun Tech | Not officially confirmed; led 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 put in the apps became the strategic question after they existed. Jiuzhou's answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, 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. According to the same report, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap reporting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but they reach the audience without a translation layer. 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 sit in the library of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. The originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots, most prominently Holywater, whose My Drama app secured an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 along with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Say
A number of research firms were monitoring the overseas business by 2025, and their estimates diverge in revealing ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Across the whole 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, 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. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is what Omdia also expects the US to reach in 2026. 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 puts ReelShort's revenue at $785 million in 2025 and expects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Its market-share estimates are the most telling for this timeline: 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.
Where the Timeline Points Next
When the milestones are laid end to end, a few patterns stand out. First, the overseas business still looks small next to its origin: 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. With DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter, competition at the top has grown closer as well. Monetization has settled on 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. The area most likely to change next is production, since DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. Regardless of whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product is still what duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.