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A One-Handed Format: Duanju Where It Began

Rather than a company, the history of Chinese short drama begins with a screen format. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” renders literally, names vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. With episodes lasting between one and two minutes, a single Divorced, Now a Lycan Princess online title usually stretches across 20 to 100 installments. A reliable stock of premises underpins the stories: tales of revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family strife. Every one of those premises can be grasped in seconds, and that matters when a whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb moves on. As a business, the format answers a question that conventional television rarely had to ask: how do you sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. The very same product now reaches English-speaking audiences under other names, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic is the thread tying together every stage of the timeline that follows.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

The earliest milestone is regulatory, not commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Because recognition turns a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, that step matters more than it might appear. Because a named genre can be followed from one year to the next, later figures about the sector can be compared at all. Commercial success was not ensured by any of this, and for a young industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways. The effect was to shift short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, the data revealed a sector large enough to stand comparison against the country’s cinemas.

2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office

Nothing measures how far the format had come as clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. According to figures published in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For the first time, the sector earned more than China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. Estimates put the viewership that year at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, studios put out more than 30,000 titles. That volume reveals as much about the industry’s shape as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. It also points to fierce competition: every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad, because the overseas push had not waited for this milestone.

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

The first mover 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. Next came DramaBox in April 2023. Beijing Dianzhong Technology develops it, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. In June 2023 GoodShort debuted under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a less solid source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under another 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. The repeating pattern 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. What people who watch dramas online in English actually 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 or Western Originals

The strategic question, after the apps existed, became what to fill them with. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its domestic library. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had produced for overseas markets were dubbed Chinese adaptations, and 20 percent were original overseas productions. That same report placed the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes clear sense for a company with a deep domestic library. While 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. That audience is specific: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. Series such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis appear in the library of DramaBox, which runs 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 took 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 Show

The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures differ in revealing ways. In the first quarter of 2025, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps was estimated at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States supplying 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals, but for the full year Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent. 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. For 2026, Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. 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 estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it expects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. Its market-share estimates are the most telling for this timeline: 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.

Reading the Timeline Ahead

Laid end to end, the milestones show a few patterns. 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 modest beside its origin. Second, growth is likely slowing: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year. At the top, competition has grown closer too: DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on a familiar shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps including 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 produces 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.