A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju at Home
It is a format, rather than a company, that begins the story of Chinese short drama. The word duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, stands for vertical-format series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. With episodes lasting one to two minutes, a single title typically takes 20 to 100 episodes. A trusty stock of premises underpins the plots: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family strife. Each of these premises can be grasped in seconds, which counts for a lot when a complete episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb flicks onward. Looked at as a business, the format play-drama.com addresses a question conventional television seldom had to ask, in other words how to sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. The same product now reaches English-speaking audiences under other terms, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic is the thread that runs through every stage of the timeline that follows.
2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map
Administrative rather than commercial: that is the nature of the earliest milestone. In 2020, duanju was formally acknowledged as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. Recognition transforms a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, which is why the step matters more than it might seem. A genre with a name can be monitored from one year to the next, which is what lets later figures about the sector to be compared at all. Regulatory attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. Its effect was to move short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, revealed a sector big enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.
2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office
Nothing captures how far the format had come as clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. In China, short drama income hit 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, according to data released in mid-2025. That was the first year the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. Production companies put out more than 30,000 titles that year. Figures put the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. That sheer volume says as much about the industry’s shape as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing ideas at scale. It also points to fierce competition: every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The push overseas, however, had not waited for this milestone, and by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave
ReelShort debuted in August 2022 and was the first to move. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is backed by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox came next, made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, a company reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a less solid source. Alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture launched 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, released through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, was the company’s entry in September 2024, and the company’s FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. Again and again, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong stands in front of a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. That corporate map is largely invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Operating company | Service | Chinese tie | Launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | China-based COL Group backs it | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | A subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly a part of Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names appear to be a single app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Part of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech app | Not confirmed; highest 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
What to stock the apps with became the strategic question as soon as they existed. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, relied heavily on its domestic catalogue. 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 that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was put at $100,000 to $150,000. Because dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been 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 are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US, which shows that this audience is well defined. DramaBox maintains a production team in Los Angeles, and its library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also drawn in firms without them, most visibly 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
The overseas business had drawn the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures differ 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 supplying 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 give slightly different totals. Omdia takes a wider view: it estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projects $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 reported in August 2026. MPA estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it expects $1.05 billion, 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, DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.
Where the Timeline Points Next
Lined up end to end, the milestones show a few patterns. The first pattern is about scale: the overseas business still looks modest next to its origin, as Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, which points to the second pattern, a likely cooling of growth. As DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter, the contest at the top has tightened as well. Monetization has taken on a recognizable 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 part of the business most likely to change next: 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. No matter whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output come out on top in the next phase, the product remains what duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.