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A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market

It is a format, rather than a company, that opens the tale of Chinese short drama. The Chinese word duanju, which “short drama” translates literally, describes vertical series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. The episodes play for one to two minutes, and a single title normally spans 20 to 100 installments. The storylines come The Possessive Alpha free from a proven stock of premises: tales of revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family conflict. Being understandable in seconds matters for every one of those premises, because an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. How can you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time? Conventional television hardly ever had to ask that question, but viewed as a business, the format settles it. English-language viewers now encounter the same product under other labels, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the timeline that follows.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

The earliest milestone turns out to be regulatory, not a commercial one. In 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. This move matters more than it might appear: recognition converts a fuzzy category of online clips into something able to be classified, counted 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. None of this ensured commercial success, and a regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a new industry. Recognition did, however, push short drama from the fringes 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 Out-Earned the Box Office

Nothing measures how far the format had come more clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. According to figures released in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For the first time, the sector out-earned China’s box office, a landmark crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. In 2024, producers released more than 30,000 titles. Figures put the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. That volume is as telling about the industry’s makeup as the revenue figure is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. The volume also implies intense competition: every one of those titles is competing 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 selling the same model abroad by 2024.

Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave

ReelShort went live in August 2022 and was the first to move. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. Then came DramaBox in April 2023. Its developer is Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, is its owner. Singapore New Reading Technology launched GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, though no rename has been formally announced. DramaWave, published through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The common thread is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong standing in front of a business whose capital or parentage goes 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.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

What to stock the apps with became the strategic question as soon as they existed. 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 made for overseas markets 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 prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US, so that audience is well defined. DramaBox’s lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company maintains a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been drawn into the originals market. The most prominent is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, together with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Say

By 2025 the overseas business was being followed by several research firms, and their figures vary in instructive 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. 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 give slightly different totals. A broader view comes from Omdia, which puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, including $3 billion 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 expects the US to reach in 2026. Media Partners Asia placed revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031 in estimates published 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. For this timeline, MPA’s market-share estimates are the most instructive: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.

Where the Timeline Points Next

Several patterns become clear when the milestones are lined up 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 next to 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. The race at the top has grown tighter as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has taken on a familiar shape. As of September 2026, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, though prices vary by country, platform and promotion. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue exceeded $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. No matter whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.