A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju at Home
Chinese short drama’s story starts with a screen format and not with a corporation. Rendered literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it refers to vertical series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. A single title generally extends over 20 to 100 instalments, with each episode playing for between one and two https://www.reelshorts.org/where-to-watch/my-x-ray-vision-sees-right-through-you/ minutes. The plots come from a dependable set of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family conflict. A whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away, so it matters that each of those setups can be grasped in seconds. As a business, the format resolves a question that traditional television rarely had to ask: how do you sell a story in fragments small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are some of the other terms under which English-speaking audiences now encounter the same product. Through every stage of the timeline that follows, this pay-per-piece logic is the connecting thread.
2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map
Administrative rather than commercial: that is how to describe the first milestone. In 2020, duanju was formally acknowledged as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. Recognition turns a loose category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised, which is why that step matters more than it might appear. Since a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, later numbers about the sector can be compared at all. Business success was not guaranteed by any of this, and for a young industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways. What recognition did was nudge short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, pointed to a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.
2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office
Nothing measures how far the format had come as clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. In China, short drama income came to 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, going by data published in mid-2025. For an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a landmark crossover: the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office. That year, studios released more than 30,000 titles. Figures placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. The volume is as revealing about the industry’s structure as the revenue figure is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. It also implies fierce competition: every one of those titles is fighting 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 offering the same model abroad by 2024.
Moving Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave
ReelShort was first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. It is operated by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox arrived next in April 2023; it is made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a shakier source. Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, along with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been officially announced. Kunlun Tech joined the market in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business; according to Sensor Tower, its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. 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. What people who watch dramas online in English see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; the corporate map is mostly invisible from where they sit.
| Company | Service | Chinese tie | Debut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backing from China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | Singapore subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly belongs to Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names seem to be one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Part of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech’s own app | Not officially confirmed; led global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No Chinese link; Fox Entertainment stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals
The strategic question, after the apps existed, was what to fill them with. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, drew heavily on its domestic catalogue. 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 the same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was put at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes obvious sense for a company with a deep domestic library, because it extends the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals are more expensive: TheWrap cites $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. But 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. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis appear in the catalogue of DramaBox, which runs a production team in Los Angeles. Chinese roots are not universal: the originals market has also drawn in firms without them, most notably Holywater, whose My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 together with 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 tracked by several research firms, and their figures differ in revealing ways. Sensor Tower estimated worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps at about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, with the United States accounting for 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 cite slightly different totals. 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. Omdia also projects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 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. ReelShort’s revenue comes to $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in its work is more telling for this timeline than its 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, roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.
Looking Ahead Along the Timeline
Lined up end to end, the milestones reveal a few patterns. The first is that the overseas business still looks modest compared with its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. 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 over year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. Competition at the top has tightened 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 platform, country and promotion. Production is the area most likely to change next, because 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. What is being sold is still the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.
