A One-Handed Format: Duanju at Home
Chinese short drama’s history starts with a format rather than a corporation. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, stands for vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Since episodes run between one and two minutes, a single title typically stretches across 20 to 100 episodes. The narratives draw on a reliable menu of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family conflict. Each one of those setups can be understood in seconds, and that matters when an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb moves on. Viewed as a business, the format solves a question ordinary television seldom had to ask, that is, how https://fruit-love-island.org/series/bound-by-vendetta-sleeping-with-the-enemy/ to sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. The same product now greets English-language audiences under other terms, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the chronology below.
2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre
It’s an administrative milestone, not a commercial one, that comes first. Back in 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Recognition turns a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, which is why that step matters more than it might appear. A genre with a name can be tracked from one year to the next, which is what allows later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. None of it assured commercial success, and regulatory attention can cut both ways for a nascent industry. Its effect was to push short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters is what that data showed four years later.
2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office
Nothing captures how far the format had come as clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. In China, short drama income came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, going by figures released in mid-2025. It was the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office, a telling crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. Production companies released more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. That output reveals as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does, because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. Every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also suggests stiff competition. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad, as the overseas push had not waited for this milestone.
Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. The app is run by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is backed by China-based COL Group. Next up came DramaBox in April 2023. It is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, is its owner. Singapore New Reading Technology brought out GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a less solid source. Besides 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been formally announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name. DramaWave, published through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and the company’s FreeReels app topped 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 fronts a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. Most of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Company behind it | App name | China connection | Debut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backed by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | A subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly under Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; both names appear to belong to one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Belongs to Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | An app from Kunlun Tech | Not confirmed; top global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | None at all; Fox Entertainment equity stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports or Western Originals
The key strategic question, after the apps existed, was what to fill them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its home catalogue. Of its more than 600 mini-dramas made for overseas markets, 20 percent were original overseas productions, while about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 by the estimate of the same report. For a company with a rich domestic library, dubbing makes plain sense, because it extends the life of titles that have already been paid for. 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. In October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; that audience, in other words, is well defined. DramaBox has a production team in Los Angeles, and its lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. The originals market has also pulled in companies without Chinese roots, most visibly 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 the Market Trackers Say
By 2025 the overseas business was being followed by several research firms, and their figures differ in instructive ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps reached about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States contributing 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. Omdia takes 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 expects the US to reach $1.5 billion, half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia pegged 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. Nothing in MPA’s work is more telling for this timeline than its market-share estimates: ReelShort with 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 Forward
Lined up end to end, the milestones reveal several clear 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. The second pattern is that growth is likely cooling, as Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. Competition at the top has grown closer as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on a recognizable shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly creates 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.
