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A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju at Home

The story of Chinese short drama opens with a screen format rather than a corporation. Rendered literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it describes vertical shows composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Each episode lasts one to two minutes, while a single title usually spans 20 to 100 installments. A trusty stock of premises supplies the storylines: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family strife. Being graspable in seconds is important for every one of those setups, because a whole episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb moves on. From a business angle, https://www.reelshorts.org/where-to-watch/the-dragon-king-s-captive/ the format answers a question that conventional television rarely had to ask: how do you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time. The same product now reaches English-speaking audiences under other labels, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the timeline below.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map

The opening milestone turns out to be administrative, not a commercial one. Back in 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially recognized duanju as a genre. The step matters more than it might look: recognition transforms a fuzzy category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. Following a named genre from one year to the next is possible, and that is what allows later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. Commercial success was not assured by any of this, and for a fledgling industry, attention from a regulator can cut both ways. Short drama was shifted 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 is what that data revealed four years later.

2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

Nothing captures how far the format had come more clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. According to figures released in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China hit 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a landmark crossover: the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office. That year, the audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, production companies rolled out more than 30,000 titles. The volume is as informative about the industry’s structure as the revenue figure is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. It also implies fierce competition: every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad, as the overseas push had not waited for this milestone.

Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Behind the Export Wave

ReelShort launched in August 2022 and was first off the line. The app is run by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is supported by China-based COL Group. Next up came DramaBox in April 2023. Its developer is Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. In June 2023 GoodShort launched under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a less solid source. Alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been officially announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name. Kunlun Tech joined the market in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business; according to Sensor Tower, its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. A business whose capital or parentage traces back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the repeating pattern. 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. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its home catalogue. It had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent of them were original overseas productions. The same report said, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious sense for a company with a rich domestic library. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they cost more, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. That audience is distinct: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. Series such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis sit in the library of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. Most visibly, Holywater shows that the originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots; its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025, plus a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Report

By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures vary in telling ways. The United States accounted for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of global in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower pegged at about $700 million. Sensor Tower’s data puts whole-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, although different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals. Taking a wider view, Omdia estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also expects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, or half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia placed revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031 in estimates published in August 2026. For ReelShort, MPA puts revenue of $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in MPA’s work is more telling for this timeline than its market-share estimates: about 29 percent outside China for ReelShort, 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, several patterns stand out. The first is that the overseas business still looks modest compared with 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 puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, which points to the second pattern, a likely slowing of growth. As DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter, the contest at the top has tightened as well. The way these apps make money has settled into a familiar shape: across apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026, though prices vary by country, platform and promotion. Production is the part of the business most likely to change next: DramaWave, whose annualized revenue exceeded $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.