A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju Where It Began

The story of Chinese short drama starts with a screen format rather than a corporation. The Chinese word duanju, which "short drama" renders literally, refers to vertical series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. With episodes running between one and two minutes, a single title generally needs 20 to 100 episodes. A dependable set of premises feeds the plots: tales of revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family conflict. Every one of those premises can be understood in seconds, and that is crucial because a whole episode has to hit home before the viewer's thumb moves on. Looked at as a business, the real-short.net format settles a question ordinary television rarely had to ask, specifically how to sell a story in portions small enough to price one at a time. English-speaking audiences now come across the same product under other terms, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic is the thread that runs through every stage of the timeline laid out here.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

The opening milestone is administrative rather than commercial. In 2020, duanju was officially recognized as a genre by China's regulator, the NRTA. This move counts more than it might seem, because recognition converts a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. Later data about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next. Nothing about this ensured commercial success, and a regulator's attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry. Its effect was to shift short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, showed a sector big enough to be measured against the country's cinemas.

2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, turn to the domestic figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures published in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector out-earned China's box office, a landmark crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. More than 30,000 titles hit the market that year. Over the same twelve months, the audience was put at 662 million viewers. That output 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. Every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer's day, which also suggests fierce competition. However, the push abroad had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad.

Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave

First out of the gate was ReelShort, which went live in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, operates the app, and China-based COL Group supports the studio. DramaBox, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer's Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, followed in April 2023. In June 2023 GoodShort arrived under Singapore New Reading Technology; the company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a thinner source. Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, 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 topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The recurring pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting for a business whose capital or parentage traces 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 vs. Western Originals

What to stock the apps with became the strategic question after they existed. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou's answer leaned heavily on its home 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. In that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was pegged at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library, because it extends the life of titles that have already been paid for. 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. Back in October 2024, TheWrap found that about 75 percent of ReelShort's users were women and about half were in the US; the audience, in other words, is specific. DramaBox operates a production team in Los Angeles, and its library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. The originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots, most prominently Holywater, whose My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 along with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers' Numbers

By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures diverge in telling 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 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, although 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 projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is the amount Omdia also projects the US to reach in 2026. Media Partners Asia, in estimates reported in August 2026, put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. For ReelShort, MPA estimates revenue at $785 million in 2025 and projects $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: about 29 percent outside China for ReelShort, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, roughly 69 percent in total for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Into the Future

A number of patterns become clear when the milestones are lined up end to end. Omdia's figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which gives the first pattern: the overseas business still looks modest next to its origin. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, which suggests the second pattern, a likely cooling of growth. As DramaBox and ReelShort each bringing in about $140 million in that quarter, the contest at the top has tightened as well. Monetization has settled on a familiar shape, and a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by platform, country and promotion. DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, so production is the area most likely to change next. Regardless of whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.