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A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began

The account of Chinese short drama starts with a format rather than a company. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” translates literally, describes vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Every episode plays for from one to two minutes, while a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 episodes. A reliable set of premises feeds the https://aifruitloveisland.org/actors/marc-herrmann/ plots: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, identity reveals and family feuds. Being graspable in seconds counts for every one of those setups, because an entire episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. How do you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time? Traditional television seldom had to ask that question, but viewed as a business, the format settles it. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other labels under which English-speaking audiences now encounter the same product. This pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the timeline ahead.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map

The earliest milestone is regulatory, not a commercial one. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, officially classified duanju as a genre. That move counts more than it might look, because recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. A genre with a name can be tracked from one year to the next, which is what enables later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. None of this ensured commercial success, and a regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a nascent industry. It did, move short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years afterward, that data showed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s film theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

How far the format had come is captured most clearly by the domestic figures for 2024. According to figures released 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 earned more than China’s box office, a telling crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. Producers put out more than 30,000 titles that year. Over the same twelve months, the viewership was placed at 662 million viewers. A business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale, so that output tells as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. Fierce competition is implied too, because every one of those titles competes for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Even so, the drive overseas had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad.

Moving Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Behind the Export Wave

ReelShort was first out of the gate, going live in August 2022. The app is operated by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is backed by China-based COL Group. Then came DramaBox in April 2023. Beijing Dianzhong Technology develops it, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, is its owner. Singapore New Reading Technology launched GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, though no rename has been officially announced. Kunlun Tech entered in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. A business whose capital or parentage traces back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the recurring pattern. For people who watch dramas online in English, that corporate map is mostly invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

What to put in the apps became the strategic question as soon as they existed. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its domestic library. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had made 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 put at $100,000 to $150,000. Because dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been paid for, it makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals cost more, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but they reach the audience without a translation layer. Back in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; the audience, in other words, is well defined. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company maintains a production team in Los Angeles. Most notably, Holywater shows that the originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots; its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025, plus a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Report

By 2025 the overseas business was being followed by several research firms, and their figures vary in revealing ways. Sensor Tower put worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps at about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the full year, Sensor Tower’s data puts 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, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projecting $14 billion by the end of 2026. In 2026, Omdia also projects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. Estimates from Media Partners Asia, 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. ReelShort’s revenue stands at $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. The most telling figures for this timeline are MPA’s market-share estimates: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, followed by 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.

Reading the Timeline Into the Future

When the milestones are placed end to end, several patterns emerge. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which gives the first pattern: the overseas business still looks modest 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 over year, which suggests the second pattern, a likely cooling of growth. With DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter, competition at the top has tightened as well. The way these apps make money has settled into a recognizable shape: across apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026, although prices vary by country, platform and promotion. DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, so production is the area most likely to change next. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, stays the product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.