A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil
Chinese short drama’s story opens with a format and not with a corporation. “Short drama” is the literal translation of duanju, a label for upright series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. Since episodes run between one and two minutes, a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 instalments. The stories pull from a proven stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family conflict. Being understandable in seconds matters for every one of those premises, because a whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. How do you sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time? Regular television rarely had to reelshorts.org ask that question, but seen as a business, the format answers it. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other terms under which English-speaking audiences now come across the same product. This pay-per-piece logic is the thread that runs through every stage of the timeline that follows.
2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map
Administrative rather than commercial: that is how to describe the first milestone. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, officially classified duanju as a genre. The step counts more than it might look, because recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised. Following a named genre from one year to the next is feasible, and that is what allows later figures about the sector to be compared at all. None of this assured commercial success, and a regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a nascent industry. Recognition did, however, move short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector large enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas was what that data revealed four years later.
2024: The Year Short Drama Out-Earned the Box Office
For a clear measure of how far the format had come, consider the home-market figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China hit 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to numbers made public in mid-2025. It was the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office, a headline crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was put at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles hit the market over the same twelve months. The volume is as revealing about the industry’s structure as the revenue is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. The volume also points to 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 marketing the same model abroad, because the push abroad had not waited for this milestone.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave
ReelShort came first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, runs it, and China-based COL Group supports the studio. DramaBox, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, came next in April 2023. GoodShort launched 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 officially announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name. Kunlun Tech joined the market in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business; going by Sensor Tower’s data, its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. The recurring pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting for a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. Much of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Company | Service | China connection | Launch date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Supported 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 a part of Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names appear to be one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Part of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | App owned by Kunlun Tech | Not confirmed; topped global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | None at all; Fox Entertainment stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals
After the apps were in place, the big strategic question became what to stock them with. According to a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by drawing heavily on its home catalogue. It had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent of them were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. According to the same report, 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 large domestic library. Although Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, they reach the audience without a translation layer. TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US, so that audience is well defined. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis sit in the catalogue of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. The originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots, most notably Holywater, whose My Drama app received 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 Show
By 2025 several research firms were monitoring the overseas business, and their figures vary in instructive ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps stood at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States supplying 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. Omdia offers a broader view: it puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, which would be half of all revenue outside China. Figures 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. For ReelShort, MPA estimates revenue at $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. The most revealing figures for this timeline are its market-share estimates: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, followed by DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.
Reading the Timeline Forward
Laid end to end, the milestones show several patterns. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which gives the first pattern: the overseas business still looks small next to its origin. 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 on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. At the top, competition has tightened too: DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter. 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. Production is the area most likely to change next: 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 core offer whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.