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A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market
It is a format, not a company, that opens the story of Chinese short drama. The Chinese word duanju, which “short drama” translates literally, names vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. With episodes lasting between one and two minutes, a single title usually takes 20 to 100 installments. The storylines are drawn https://reelshortmovies.org/ from a proven kit of premises: tales of revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family conflict. Being easy to absorb in seconds counts for each of those premises, because a whole episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb moves on. How can you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time? Traditional television hardly ever had to ask that question, but viewed as a business, the format settles it. Under other labels, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-speaking audiences now encounter the same product. Through every stage of the timeline below, that pay-per-piece logic is the thread.
2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official
It’s a regulatory milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. That step matters more than it might seem, because recognition converts a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. A named genre can be followed from one year to the next, which is what enables later figures about the sector to be compared at all. None of it ensured commercial success, and a regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a nascent industry. It did, shift short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas was what that data showed four years later.
2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office
How far the format had come is captured most clearly by the home-market figures for 2024. According to data made public in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. That was the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office, a landmark 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, studios put out more than 30,000 titles. That sheer volume says as much about the industry’s shape as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. Every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also suggests fierce competition. The overseas push had not, however, waited for this milestone; a number of Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.
Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Behind the Export Wave
ReelShort came first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, manages it, and China-based COL Group supports the studio. Then came DramaBox in April 2023. Beijing Dianzhong Technology develops it, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, a company reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a less solid source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under a different name, even though no rename has been formally announced. DramaWave, released 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. Time and again, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong stands in front of a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. What people who watch dramas online in English actually see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; the corporate map is mostly invisible to them.
| Operator | App | Link to China | Launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | China-based COL Group backs it | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | 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 appear to be one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Sits within Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | App owned by Kunlun Tech | Not officially confirmed; highest global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No Chinese link; Fox Entertainment equity stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports or Western Originals
The strategic question, once the apps existed, was what to fill them with. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its home catalogue. The company had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent of them were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 in the view of the same report. Since dubbing prolongs the life of titles already paid for, it makes clear sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Although Western originals cost more, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, they reach the audience without a translation layer. This audience is distinct: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company operates a production team in Los Angeles. The originals market has also pulled in companies without Chinese roots, 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
Multiple research firms were monitoring the overseas business by 2025, and their figures differ in revealing ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps stood at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States accounting for 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 wider view, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and predicting $14 billion by the end of 2026. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is what Omdia also expects the US to reach in 2026. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia put 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 and forecasts $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 at about 29 percent outside China, then 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.
Looking Ahead Along the Timeline
Lined up end to end, the milestones show several patterns. The first pattern is one of scale: the overseas business still looks small beside its origin, as Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, which suggests the second pattern, a likely cooling 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 on a familiar 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. Production is the part of the business most likely to change next: 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. What is being sold remains the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase.
