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A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil

Chinese short drama’s tale starts with a screen format instead of a company. Taken literally, the Chinese term duanju comes out as « short drama », and it covers vertical series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. With episodes running one to two minutes, a single title generally needs 20 to 100 installments. The storylines are drawn from a dependable set of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family strife. Each such setup can be picked up in seconds, which matters when a complete episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb flicks onward. How can you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time? Traditional television seldom had to ask that question, but considered as a business, the format answers it. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are some of the other terms under which English-language audiences now meet the same product. Across every stage of the timeline below, that pay-per-piece logic is the thread.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

The opening milestone is administrative, not commercial. Back in 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, which is why this move matters more than it might seem. Later data about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be followed from one year to the next. For a nascent industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. It did, however, push short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, that data showed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

The home-market figures for 2024 are the clearest measure of how far the format had come. Short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to data published in mid-2025. That year marked the first time the sector out-earned China’s box office: a symbolic crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. More than 30,000 titles were released that year. Over the same twelve months, the viewership was placed at 662 million viewers. A business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale, so that output tells as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. It also points to heavy competition, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad, since the push abroad had not waited for this milestone.

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

ReelShort launched in August 2022 and was first out of the gate. The app is run by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is supported 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 arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a thinner source. Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, along with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been officially announced. Kunlun Tech arrived 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. What recurs is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. Much of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: all they notice is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

The strategic question, after the apps existed, became what to put in them. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, leaned 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 of them were original overseas productions. In that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was put at $100,000 to $150,000. Because dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, it makes obvious sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Western originals are more expensive: TheWrap quotes $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Yet 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 specific. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox offers titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its catalogue. Companies without Chinese roots have also been attracted to the originals market. The best-known is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, together with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers’ Numbers

By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures diverge in telling ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps was estimated at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Different reports of the same dataset quote slightly different totals, but for the full year Sensor Tower’s data places in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent. Omdia offers a wider view: it estimates 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 expects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia, in estimates 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 of $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, its market-share estimates are the most instructive: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links. Xander S Golden Era

Looking Ahead Along the Timeline

When the milestones are placed end to end, several patterns emerge. 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. 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. With DramaBox and ReelShort each bringing in about $140 million in that quarter, the contest at the top has grown closer 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, although 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 generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. The product is still the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.