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A One-Handed Format: Duanju Where It Began

It’s a format, not a company, that begins the history of Chinese short drama. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” renders literally, describes vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Every episode plays for one to two minutes, while a single title usually spans 20 to 100 instalments. A proven toolkit of premises drives the plots: tales https://www.reelshorts.org/ of revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family strife. Each of those setups can be understood in seconds, which counts for a lot when a whole episode has to make its point before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. How do you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time? Conventional television rarely had to ask that question, but viewed as a business, the format solves it. Under different names, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-speaking audiences now find the same product. Every stage of the timeline that follows is tied together by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

The earliest milestone is bureaucratic rather than commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially recognized duanju as a genre. That step matters more than it might look, because recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised. Later data 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 ensured commercial success. What recognition did was shift short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, revealed a sector big enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

The figures from inside China for 2024 are the sharpest measure of how far the format had come. In China, short drama takings hit 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, according to figures published in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector out-earned China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles arrived over the same twelve months. Because a business putting out 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. The volume also implies intense competition: every one of those titles is competing 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 Behind the Export Wave

First to launch was ReelShort, which debuted in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, runs it, and China-based COL Group backs the studio. In April 2023 DramaBox followed, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a thinner 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. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech joined the field with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower the company’s FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. Over and over, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronts a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. What people who watch dramas online in English see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; that corporate map is mostly invisible from where they sit.

Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals

What to stock the apps with became the strategic question after they existed. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, drew heavily on its domestic catalogue. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had produced for overseas markets, about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. The same report said, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library. Although Western originals cost more, with TheWrap quoting $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 runs a production team in Los Angeles, and its catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Companies without Chinese roots have also been drawn into the originals market. The best-known is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, plus a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Report

The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures diverge in revealing ways. The United States accounted for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower estimated 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, though different reports of the same dataset cite slightly different totals. Taking a wider view, Omdia puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also expects the US to climb to $1.5 billion in 2026, 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. MPA puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and expects $1.05 billion in 2026, 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, or roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Forward

Lay the milestones end to end and a few patterns become clear. The first is that the overseas business still looks modest beside its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second is a likely cooling 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. The contest at the top has grown closer as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled into 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. What is most likely to change next is production, because 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. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, remains the core offer whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.