A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju at Home
Instead of a firm, the story of Chinese short drama starts with a format. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” translates word for word, names vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Individual episodes play for from one to two minutes, and a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 episodes. The stories rely on a reliable stock of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, hidden-identity reveals and family strife. Each such setup can be grasped in seconds, which counts for a www.reelshortfree.org lot when a complete episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. How can you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time? Conventional television rarely had to ask that question, but seen as a business, the format answers it. Under other labels, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, 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 Gives the Genre Official Standing
The first milestone is administrative rather than commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Recognition turns a vague category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised, which is why this move matters more than it might appear. Later data about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next. For a young industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways, and none of this ensured 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. A sector big enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters was what that data showed four years later.
2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office
Nothing captures how far the format had come as clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. Numbers published in mid-2025 put short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For the first time, the sector earned more than China’s box office, a telling crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. In 2024, producers put out more than 30,000 titles. The viewership over the same twelve months was put at 662 million viewers. A business rolling out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale, so this volume tells as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. The volume also implies intense competition: every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Still, the overseas push had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad.
Moving Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving the Export Wave
ReelShort went live in August 2022 and was the first to move. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, runs the app, and China-based COL Group backs the studio. DramaBox, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, followed in April 2023. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, a company reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. Besides 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been officially announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name. DramaWave, released through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, was the company’s entry in September 2024, and the company’s FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. A business whose capital or parentage traces back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the recurring 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 | Service | Link to China | Launch date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | China-based COL Group backs it | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | Singapore subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly under 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 | Sits within Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | An app from Kunlun Tech | Unconfirmed; led global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | None; Fox Entertainment equity stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals
After the apps existed, the strategic question became what to put in them. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, drew heavily on its domestic catalogue. 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 put 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 cost more, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but they reach the audience without a translation layer. This audience is well defined: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis appear in the catalogue of DramaBox, which runs a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been pulled into the originals market. The most prominent is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, along with a Fox commitment to make 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 estimates diverge in revealing ways. According to Sensor Tower, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to 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 sets 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. A wider view comes from Omdia, which puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, including $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 expects the US to reach in 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 in estimates published in August 2026. MPA estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025; for 2026 it projects $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, its market-share estimates are the most instructive: 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.
Reading the Timeline Forward
Put the milestones end to end and several patterns become clear. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which points to the first pattern: the overseas business still looks small next to its origin. The second is a likely cooling of growth, with Sensor Tower putting the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. The race at the top has tightened as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has settled into a recognizable shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output claim the next phase, the product stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.