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A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil

Rather than a firm, the story of Chinese short drama starts with a format. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, stands for vertical shows composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Since episodes last between one and two minutes, a single title generally needs 20 to Fated To My Ruthless Alpha 100 installments. The stories pull from a dependable set of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family strife. Each of these premises can be picked up in seconds, which is important when an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb moves on. How do you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time? Traditional television rarely had to ask that question, but considered as a business, the format settles it. English-language audiences now run into the same product under other terms, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Through every stage of the timeline that follows, that pay-per-piece logic is the common thread.

2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre

It’s a regulatory milestone, not a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, duanju was officially recognized as a genre by the Chinese regulator, the NRTA. Recognition converts a loose category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised, which is why this move matters more than it might seem. A named genre can be followed from one year to the next, which is what lets later figures about the sector to be compared at all. Regulatory attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry, and nothing about this assured commercial success. What recognition did was push short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector big enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters was what that data revealed four years later.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

For a clear measure of how far the format had come, look at the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China climbed to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures made public in mid-2025. For an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a symbolic crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. More than 30,000 titles were released in 2024. Over the same twelve months, the audience was placed at 662 million viewers. Since a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale, that output reveals as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. It also implies intense competition: every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Still, the overseas push had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.

Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave

First to launch was ReelShort, which went live in August 2022. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, followed in April 2023. In June 2023 GoodShort launched under Singapore New Reading Technology; the company is reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a less solid source. In addition to 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 a different name. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech entered with DramaWave, which it published through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower the company’s FreeReels app topped 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 recurring pattern. What people who watch dramas online in English see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; the corporate map is largely invisible from where they sit.

Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals

The key strategic question, once the apps existed, became what to stock them with. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its home catalogue. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had created for overseas markets were dubbed Chinese adaptations, and 20 percent were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 by the estimate of the same report. Dubbing makes plain sense for a company with a rich domestic library, because it extends the life of titles that have already been paid for. While Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap quoting $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, which shows that this audience is specific. DramaBox maintains 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: What the Market Trackers Show

By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures diverge in telling ways. Sensor Tower pegged worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps at about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States supplying 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the full year, Sensor Tower’s data sets in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, and different reports of the same dataset quote slightly different totals. Omdia offers a wider 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 projects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031 in estimates reported in August 2026. MPA puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and expects $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 with 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 Ahead

When the milestones are placed end to end, several patterns emerge. The first pattern is one of scale: the overseas business still looks small beside its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. 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 slowing of growth. DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter, which means competition at the top has grown closer as well. 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 such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue exceeded $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.