A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market
Chinese short drama’s tale begins with a screen format instead of a firm. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” translates word for word, names vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. A single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 episodes, with each episode running one to two minutes. A proven kit of premises underpins the stories: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family conflict. Every one of those setups can be followed in seconds, which is important when a whole episode has to connect before the viewer’s thumb flicks onward. Conventional television rarely had to ask how to sell a story in www.reel-shorts.net/series/how-to-break-a-dilf pieces small enough to price one at a time, yet viewed as a business, this format solves exactly that question. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are some of the other terms under which English-language audiences now encounter the same product. This pay-per-piece logic is the thread tying together every stage of the timeline that follows.
2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map
The opening milestone turns out to be regulatory, not a commercial one. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, formally recognized duanju as a genre. Recognition converts a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, which is why that step matters more than it might seem. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is feasible, and that is what allows later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. Nothing about this guaranteed commercial success, and regulatory attention can cut both ways for a new industry. Its effect was to shift short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, that data showed a sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.
2024: The Year Short Drama Out-Earned the Box Office
Nothing shows how far the format had come more clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to numbers published in mid-2025. For an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a landmark crossover: the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office. Studios rolled out more than 30,000 titles in 2024. Figures placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. Since a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale, that output reveals as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. It also signals heavy competition, since 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.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave
ReelShort launched in August 2022 and was the first to move. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox came next in April 2023; it is built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a shakier source. In addition to 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been formally announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name. Kunlun Tech arrived in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business; going by Sensor Tower’s data, its FreeReels app led 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. 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.
| Operating company | App name | China connection | Launched |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backed by 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 part of Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names appear to be one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | A unit of 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; stake held by Fox Entertainment since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals
The strategic question, once the apps existed, was what to stock them with. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its domestic library. Of the more than 600 mini-dramas made for overseas markets, 20 percent were original overseas productions, while about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations. That same report put the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Because dubbing prolongs the life of titles already paid for, it makes obvious sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they cost more, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. This 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. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company runs a production team in Los Angeles. Most visibly, Holywater shows that the originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots; its 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 Report
Multiple research firms were monitoring the overseas business by 2025, and their figures diverge in instructive ways. The United States accounted for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of global in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower pegged at about $700 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 forecasting $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, or half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia placed revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031 in estimates reported in August 2026. For ReelShort, MPA puts revenue of $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. The most revealing figures for this timeline are MPA’s market-share estimates: about 29 percent outside China for ReelShort, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, or roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.
Reading the Timeline Forward
When the milestones are lined up end to end, several patterns stand out. First, the overseas business still looks small next to its origin: Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second pattern is that growth is likely slowing, 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. Among the leaders, competition has grown closer too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned 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 country, platform 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 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 product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.