Waterbrook Investments & Holdings

A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju at Home

Chinese short drama’s history begins with a screen format and not with a company. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, stands for upright series set at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one hand. A single title usually extends over 20 to 100 installments, with each episode playing for between one and two minutes. The plots are built from a proven kit of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family feuds and identity reveals. An entire episode has to connect before the viewer’s thumb swipes away, so it counts for a lot that each of those setups can be understood in seconds. As a business, the format tackles a question that traditional Quiet in the Office drama television rarely needed to ask: how can you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other names under which English-language audiences now encounter the same product. That pay-per-piece logic is the thread tying together every stage of the timeline below.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

The opening milestone is administrative rather than commercial. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Recognition transforms a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, which is why that step matters more than it might appear. Later statistics about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be followed from one year to the next. A regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a fledgling industry, and nothing about this assured commercial success. The effect was to move short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters was what that data showed four years later.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

The domestic figures for 2024 are the plainest measure of how far the format had come. According to figures made public in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. That year marked the first time the sector out-earned China’s box office: a symbolic crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. More than 30,000 titles were released in 2024. Estimates placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. Since a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale, that output reveals as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does. Stiff competition is signaled too, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The push abroad had not, however, waited for this milestone; several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad by 2024.

Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Behind the Export Wave

ReelShort was first out of the gate, launching in August 2022. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox followed in April 2023; it is built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. In June 2023 GoodShort debuted under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a weaker source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under another name, even though no rename has been officially announced. 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. The pattern that keeps recurring is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong standing in front of a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. Much of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: all they notice is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

With the apps in place, the strategic question shifted to what to stock them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its domestic library. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had made for overseas markets, about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 by the estimate of the same report. For a company with a rich domestic library, dubbing makes clear sense, because it prolongs the life of titles already 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. That audience is clearly defined: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. Series 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 drawn into the originals market. The most prominent is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app secured an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, along with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Show

By 2025 the overseas business was being tracked by several research firms, and their figures vary in telling ways. Sensor Tower pegged 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. Sensor Tower’s data puts full-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. Omdia offers a broader view, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasting $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, or half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia put 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. 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. MPA’s market-share estimates are the most telling for this timeline: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, followed by DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, for a combined share of roughly 69 percent for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Forward

Laid end to end, the milestones reveal a few patterns. 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. The second pattern is that growth is likely cooling, as Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter, which means competition at the top has tightened as well. The way these apps make money has settled into a recognizable shape: for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026, though prices vary by country, platform and promotion. What is most likely to change next is production, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product is still the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.