A One-Handed Format: Duanju in Its Home Market
It is a screen format, not a company, that begins the story of Chinese short drama. Translated literally, the Chinese term duanju means «short drama», and it covers vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. Each episode runs from one to two minutes, while a single title generally runs to 20 to 100 instalments. Writers’ storylines come from a reliable stock of premises: billionaire and CEO reelshorts.org romance, revenge plots, family feuds and identity reveals. Being understandable in seconds matters for every one of those setups, because a whole episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. How can you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time? Regular television hardly ever had to ask that question, but considered as a business, the format settles it. Under other labels, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-speaking audiences now meet the same product. This pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the chronology that follows.
2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing
Administrative rather than commercial: that is how to describe the earliest milestone. In 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. That step is more important than it might appear: recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is feasible, and that is what enables later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. Business success was not assured by any of this, and for a fledgling industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways. It did, shift short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, revealed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.
2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office
Nothing shows how far the format had come more clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China hit 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures published in mid-2025. For the first time, 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, producers released more than 30,000 titles. Over the same twelve months, the viewership was placed at 662 million viewers. Because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale, that volume says as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. Fierce competition is signaled too, because every one of those titles competes for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The push abroad had not, however, waited for this milestone; a number of Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad by 2024.
Moving Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, going live in August 2022. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. Next came DramaBox in April 2023. It is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, is its owner. In June 2023 GoodShort debuted under Singapore New Reading Technology; the company is reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a weaker 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. DramaWave, published through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. Over and over, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong stands in front of a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. For people who watch dramas online in English, that corporate map is largely invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Operator | App name | Chinese link | Launch date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | China-based COL Group backs it | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | Singapore subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly under Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names appear to be a single app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Part of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | An app from Kunlun Tech | Unconfirmed; topped global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | None at all; Fox Entertainment has held a stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals
After the apps were in place, the big strategic question shifted to what to fill them with. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its home catalogue. Of the more than 600 mini-dramas produced for overseas markets, 20 percent were original overseas productions, while about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations. The same report pegged the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Since dubbing prolongs the life of titles already paid for, it makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals cost more to make, 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. Back in October 2024, TheWrap reported 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. Series such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis sit in the library of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also drawn in firms without them, most visibly 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: The Market Trackers’ Numbers
The overseas business had drawn the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures differ in instructive ways. In the first quarter of 2025, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the whole year, Sensor Tower’s data puts 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 takes 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. Omdia also anticipates the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, 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. ReelShort’s revenue stands at $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Its market-share estimates are the most telling for this timeline: 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
Lay the milestones end to end and a number of patterns stand out. The first pattern is about scale: the overseas business still looks modest next to its origin, as Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second is a likely slowing of growth, with Sensor Tower putting the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter, which means competition at the top has grown closer as well. Prices vary by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on a familiar shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, so production is the area most likely to change next. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output claim the next phase, the product is still the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.