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A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil

The tale of Chinese short drama starts with a format rather than a single company. “Short drama” is the literal translation of duanju, which describes vertical shows composed at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one hand. Each episode plays for one to two minutes, while a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 instalments. The stories rely on a proven toolkit of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family https://freedramashorts.net/ strife. Each one of those premises can be understood in seconds, and that is important because an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. As a business, the format answers a question that traditional television seldom needed to ask: how can you sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other names under which English-language audiences now come across the same product. Across every stage of the timeline that follows, that pay-per-piece logic is the common thread.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

It is an administrative milestone, not a commercial one, that comes first. Back in 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, officially recognized duanju as a genre. Recognition converts a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised, which is why that step matters more than it might appear. Later statistics about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next. For a young industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. Its effect was to move short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters is what that data showed four years later.

2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office

How far the format had come is captured most clearly by the domestic numbers for 2024. In China, short drama takings reached 50.5 billion yuan, equal to about $7 billion, according to data released in mid-2025. For an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a landmark crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. The viewership that year was put at 662 million viewers. Producers rolled out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. Since a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale, that volume reveals as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. It also signals stiff competition, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The overseas push 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 Driving the Export Wave

First to launch was ReelShort, which went live in August 2022. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox, developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, followed in April 2023. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, a company reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a thinner source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, together with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech entered in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business; according to Sensor Tower, its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. A business whose capital or parentage leads back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the repeating pattern. This corporate map is mostly invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who instead see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

What to fill the apps with became the strategic question once they existed. Per a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by relying heavily on its home catalogue. The company had produced more than 600 mini-dramas 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 pegged at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes clear sense for a company with a deep domestic library, because it extends the life of titles that have already been paid for. 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. 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. Chinese roots are not universal: 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: The Market Trackers’ Numbers

By 2025 several research firms were following the overseas business, and their figures diverge in revealing ways. The United States supplied 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of global in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower pegged at about $700 million. Sensor Tower’s data puts whole-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, although different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals. Taking a wider view, Omdia estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is the amount Omdia also projects the US to reach in 2026. Figures from Media Partners Asia, 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 puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it expects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in its work is more telling for this timeline than its market-share estimates: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, roughly 69 percent in total for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Ahead

Several patterns stand out when the milestones are laid end to end. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which points to the first pattern: the overseas business still looks small beside its origin. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, which points to the second pattern, a likely cooling of growth. Competition at the top has grown closer as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled on a recognizable shape, and a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by platform, country and promotion. 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, so production is the area most likely to change next. Regardless of whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output come out on top in the next phase, the product remains what duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.