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A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju at Home

Chinese short drama’s tale opens with a format and not with a firm. The Chinese word duanju, which „short drama” renders literally, names vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. With episodes running one to two minutes, a single title typically takes 20 to 100 installments. The plots draw on a dependable, well-worn stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family conflict and identity reveals. Each of these premises can be understood in seconds, which counts for a lot when a whole episode has to make its point before realshort.org/series/who-s-my-triplets-alpha-daddy the viewer’s thumb flicks onward. Considered as a business, the format solves a question traditional television rarely had to ask, that is, how to sell a story in chunks 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. This pay-per-piece logic threads through every stage of the chronology that follows.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

Regulatory rather than commercial: that is the nature of the earliest milestone. In 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Since recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, that step matters more than it might seem. An officially named genre can be followed from one year to the next, which is what enables later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. Commercial success was not assured by any of this, and for a fledgling industry, attention from a regulator can cut both ways. It did, shift short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, that data pointed to a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s film theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

Nothing measures how far the format had come more clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. In China, short drama revenue came to 50.5 billion yuan, equal to about $7 billion, according to figures released in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector out-earned China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles were released over the same twelve months. This volume tells as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does, because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing ideas at scale. Stiff competition is signaled too, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. However, the push abroad had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. It is managed by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is supported by China-based COL Group. Next came DramaBox in April 2023. It is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. In June 2023 GoodShort debuted under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a thinner source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture launched 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 formally announced. Kunlun Tech joined the market in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business; according to Sensor Tower, its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. Over and over, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronts a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. That corporate map is mostly invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who instead see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

What to fill the apps with became the strategic question as soon as they existed. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its domestic library. 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. Since dubbing prolongs the life of titles already paid for, it makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they are more expensive, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. This audience is distinct: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox’s lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company runs a production team in Los Angeles. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also drawn in companies without them, most notably Holywater, whose My Drama app received 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: The Market Trackers’ Numbers

By 2025 the overseas business was being tracked by several research firms, and their figures differ in revealing ways. According to Sensor Tower, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps reached about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, of which the United States contributed 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the full year, Sensor Tower’s data places 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. Taking a broader view, Omdia estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. In 2026, Omdia also projects the US to reach $1.5 billion, 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. MPA puts ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it projects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in MPA’s work is more telling for this timeline than its market-share estimates: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, roughly 69 percent in total for four apps with Chinese links.

Looking Ahead Along the Timeline

Laid end to end, the milestones show a few clear patterns. The first is that the overseas business still looks limited next to its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. Second, growth is likely easing: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year. Among the leaders, competition has tightened too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter. Prices vary 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. What is most likely to change next is production, since DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. Regardless of whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output come out on top in the next phase, the product stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.