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A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju at Home

Rather than a corporation, the story of Chinese short drama begins with a format. The Chinese word duanju, which “short drama” renders literally, describes vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. With episodes running one to two minutes, a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 episodes. The storylines are built from a dependable stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, identity reveals and family feuds. A complete episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on, so it matters that every one of those premises https://reelshorttv.org/ can be absorbed in seconds. Looked at as a business, the format addresses a question traditional television seldom had to ask, in other words 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-speaking audiences now find the same product. Each stage of the timeline ahead is held together by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

It is an administrative milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, which is why the step matters more than it might seem. Later data about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next. Business success was not ensured by any of this, and for a new industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways. The effect was to shift short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, that data pointed to a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

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

Nothing measures how far the format had come as clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. Figures released in mid-2025 put short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For the first time, the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a telling crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. Producers put out more than 30,000 titles that year. The audience over the same twelve months was put at 662 million viewers. A business rolling out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale, so this volume says as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. Every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also suggests stiff competition. The push abroad had not, however, waited for this milestone; a number of Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox came next, made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a less solid source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, though no rename has been officially announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech came in with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. Over and over, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronts a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. What people who watch dramas online in English actually see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; that corporate map is mostly invisible to them.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

With the apps in place, the strategic question became what to fill them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its home library. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had made for overseas markets, about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. The same report pegged the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals cost more, 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. 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. DramaBox runs a production team in Los Angeles, and its catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Companies without Chinese roots have also been drawn into the originals market. The best-known is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, along with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Show

By 2025 the overseas business was being tracked by several research firms, and their figures vary in useful ways. Sensor Tower put worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps at about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Sensor Tower’s data puts full-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, although different reports of the same dataset cite slightly different totals. Omdia offers a broader view: it estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and predicts $14 billion by the end of 2026. In 2026, Omdia also projects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia, in estimates 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 pegs ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, its market-share estimates are the most telling: 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.

Looking Ahead Along the Timeline

A few patterns emerge when the milestones are laid end to end. First, the overseas business still looks limited next to its origin: Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second pattern is that growth is likely cooling, 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 bringing in about $140 million in that quarter, competition at the top has tightened as well. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has settled into a familiar shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. 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, which makes production the area most likely to change next. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase, the product stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.