A One-Handed Format: Duanju in Its Home Market

Instead of a firm, the history of Chinese short drama begins with a screen format. The Chinese term duanju, which "short drama" translates word for word, refers to vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. With episodes running between one and two minutes, a single title typically takes 20 to 100 The Hidden Billionaire drama installments. Writers' storylines are drawn from a dependable kit of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, reveals of identity and family strife. Every one of those setups can be grasped in seconds, which is important when an entire episode has to hit home before the viewer's thumb swipes away. Traditional television seldom had to ask how to sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time, but seen as a business, this format answers exactly that question. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are some of the other labels under which English-speaking audiences now come across the same product. This pay-per-piece logic is the thread running through every stage of the timeline laid out here.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map

It is a regulatory milestone, not a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, China's regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. That step is more important than it might seem: recognition turns a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. Later statistics about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be followed from one year to the next. For a young industry, a regulator's attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. Its effect was to push short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, the data showed a sector big enough to stand comparison against the country's cinemas.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

For a clear measure of how far the format had come, consider the domestic figures for 2024. In China, short drama takings reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures published in mid-2025. It marked the first time the sector earned more than China's box office: a telling crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. That year's audience was pegged at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, production companies rolled out more than 30,000 titles. That 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 premises at scale. Fierce competition is suggested too, since every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer's day. The drive abroad, however, had not waited for this milestone, and by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, runs it, and China-based COL Group supports the studio. Next came DramaBox in April 2023. Its developer is Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, that company's Singapore subsidiary, owns it. GoodShort launched in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. In addition to 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been formally announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name. DramaWave, published through Kunlun Tech's Skywork AI business, was the company's entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. What keeps recurring is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong in front of a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. What people who watch dramas online in English actually see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; the corporate map is mostly invisible from where they sit.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

As soon as the apps existed, the strategic question became what to stock them with. Jiuzhou's answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, drew heavily on its home catalogue. Of its more than 600 mini-dramas produced for overseas markets, 20 percent were original overseas productions, while about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations. According to the same report, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals cost more, with TheWrap reporting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but they reach the audience without a translation layer. That audience is distinct: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort's users were women and about half were in the US. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox offers titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its catalogue. Most visibly, Holywater shows that the originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots; its 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: What the Market Trackers Show

The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures differ in instructive ways. Sensor Tower put 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. Different reports of the same dataset give 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. Taking a broader view, Omdia puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. For 2026, Omdia also projects the US to reach $1.5 billion, 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 published in August 2026. 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. The most telling figures for this timeline are MPA's market-share estimates: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, 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

A number of patterns emerge when the milestones are set end to end. The first is that the overseas business still looks small beside 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 over year. The race at the top has tightened as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled into a recognizable shape. As of September 2026, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps including 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 passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. No matter whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.