A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market

It is a format, not a company, that begins the tale of Chinese short drama. Rendered literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it describes upright series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. A single title typically extends over 20 to 100 episodes, with each episode lasting between one and two minutes. A trusty toolkit reelshorts.org/where-to-watch/the-lycan-queen-of-winter of premises supplies the storylines: tales of revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family strife. All of these setups can be followed in seconds, which is important when an entire episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. As a business, the format tackles a question that conventional television rarely had to ask: how do you sell a story in fragments small enough to price one at a time. The same product now reaches English-language audiences under other labels, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Every stage of the timeline ahead is held together by this pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

The first milestone turns out to be administrative, not a commercial one. In 2020, duanju was formally acknowledged as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. Since recognition turns a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, the step matters more than it might seem. Later figures about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next. For a nascent industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways, and none of this ensured commercial success. Short drama was shifted from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years afterward, that data pointed to a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.

2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office

Nothing captures how far the format had come more clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. In China, short drama income reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures released in mid-2025. 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. That year, the audience was put at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles hit the market over the same twelve months. That sheer volume says as much about the industry’s shape as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale. Every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also implies intense competition. 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.

Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave

ReelShort was first out of the gate, going live in August 2022. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox, developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, came next in April 2023. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under a different name, even though no rename has been officially 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. A business whose capital or parentage leads back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the repeating pattern. Much of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: all they notice is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

With the apps in place, the strategic question shifted to what to stock them with. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, relied heavily on its domestic catalogue. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had created for overseas markets were dubbed Chinese adaptations, and 20 percent were original overseas productions. In the same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was pegged at $100,000 to $150,000. For a company with a rich domestic library, dubbing makes clear sense, because it extends the life of titles already paid for. Western originals are more expensive: TheWrap puts them at $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Yet they reach the audience without a translation layer. 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 specific. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis appear in the library of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been drawn into the originals market. The best-known is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, along with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Say

The overseas business had drawn the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures diverge in telling ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, worldwide 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. Different reports of the same dataset cite 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. A broader view comes from Omdia, which puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is what Omdia also projects the US to reach in 2026. 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 puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it forecasts $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. Its market-share estimates are the most revealing for this timeline: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, followed by 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

A few patterns emerge when the milestones are laid end to end. The first is that the overseas business still looks limited beside its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, which points to the second pattern, a likely slowing of growth. DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter, which means competition at the top has tightened as well. 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. DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, which makes production the area most likely to change next. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product is still the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.