A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil
Chinese short drama’s story opens with a format rather than a company. Taken literally, the Chinese term duanju comes out as “short drama”, and it describes upright series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Individual episodes last from one to two minutes, and a watch Little Miss Fortune single title generally extends across 20 to 100 installments. A dependable stock of premises drives the plots: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family feuds and hidden-identity reveals. An entire episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away, so it matters that every one of those premises can be grasped in seconds. Traditional television seldom had to ask how to sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time, yet viewed as a business, the format solves exactly that question. Viewers in English-speaking markets now encounter the same product under other terms, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic connects every stage of the timeline that follows.
2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official
It’s a regulatory milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. The step matters more than it might seem, because recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. Later figures about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next. For a nascent industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways, and none of this ensured commercial success. Recognition did, however, push short drama from the edges 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: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office
The home-market figures for 2024 are the clearest measure of how far the format had come. In China, short drama revenue hit 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, according to data released in mid-2025. It was the first year the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was put at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, producers released more than 30,000 titles. A business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale, so that output reveals as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. Stiff competition is suggested too, because 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 selling the same model abroad, as the push abroad had not waited for this milestone.
Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave
ReelShort came 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, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, followed in April 2023. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a thinner 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 entered in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. What keeps recurring is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong in front of a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. 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.
| Operator | Service | China connection | Launched |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 a 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 | Part of 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 equity stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals
After the apps were in place, the strategic question turned to what to stock them with. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, drew heavily on its home catalogue. 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. In that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was put at $100,000 to $150,000. For a company with a rich domestic library, dubbing makes plain sense, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals cost more: TheWrap quotes $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Still, they reach the audience without a translation layer. Back in October 2024, TheWrap found that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; the audience, in other words, is well defined. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis sit in the library of DramaBox, which runs a production team in Los Angeles. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also attracted firms without them, most notably Holywater, whose My Drama app took 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 Market Trackers Report
By 2025 the overseas business was being followed by several research firms, and their figures vary in telling ways. According to Sensor Tower, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, of which the United States contributed 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 projects $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 puts revenue at $785 million in 2025 and projects $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: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, followed by DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, for a combined share of roughly 69 percent for four apps with Chinese links.
Where the Timeline Points Next
When the milestones are lined up end to end, a few patterns emerge. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which gives the first pattern: the overseas business still looks modest next to its origin. 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. DramaBox and ReelShort each took in about $140 million in that quarter, so competition at the top has tightened as well. Monetization 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 area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates 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 remains what duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.
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