A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began

The story of Chinese short drama begins with a format rather than a company. The Chinese term duanju, which “short drama” renders literally, refers to vertical series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. With episodes running ojin88bet.onene to two minutes, a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 installments. The storylines build on a dependable stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family conflict. Being understandable in seconds is important for each of those setups, because an entire episode has to register before the viewer’s dramaboxdb download thumb moves on. Conventional television rarely had to ask how to sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time, but seen as a business, the format solves exactly that question. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are among the other terms under which English-language audiences now come across the same product. Through every stage of the timak168app.babyeline that follows, this pay-per-piece logic is the thread.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

The opening milestone is administrative, not commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. Because recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, that step matters more than it might seem. Because a named genre can bak168app.clube tracked from one year to the next, later numbers about the sector can be compared at all. None of this promised commercial success, and attention from a regulator can cut both ways for a fledgling industry. Recognition did, however, move short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector large enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas is what that data revealed four years later.

2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, consider the home-market figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures releaseks168app.sited in mid-2025. That year marked the first time the sector out-earned China’s box office: a telling crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. In 2024, producers released more than 30,000 titles. Estimates placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. That output says as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale. Intense competition is suggested too, as every one of those titles competes for the same few minutes of ic88a viewer’s day. The overseas push had not, however, waited for this milestone; a number of Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.

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

ReelShort came first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. Behind the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is backed by China-based COL Group. Next came DramaBox in April 2023. Beijing Dianzhong Technology develops it, and StoryMatrix, the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a shakier source. Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV foic88r the United States, Canada and Australia, along with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, although no rename has been officially announced. Kunlun Tech arrived in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business; going by Sensor Tower’s data, its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. The repeating pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong standing in front of a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. Most of that corporate map ic88is 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

After the apps existed, the strategic question became what to stock them with. According to a China Daily report from January 202lr884, Jiuzhou answered by leaning heavily on its domestic catalogue. The company had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent of them were original overseas productions. In that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was pegged at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes plain sense for a company with an extensive domestic library, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals cost more: TheWrap quotes $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Yet they reach the audience lr88without a translation layer. Back in October 2024, TheWrap found that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; that audience, in other words, is well defined. DramaBox maintains a production team in Los Angeles, and its catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Most notably, Holywater shows that the originals market has also attracted 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 Market Trackers Report

By 2025 the overseas business was being tracked by several research firms, and their figures vary in useful ways. According to Sensor Tower, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps reached about $700 million in the first quarter of 20lr8825, of which the United States contributed 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 quote slightly different totals. Omdia offers a wider view: it estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, aop88nd predicts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia, in estimates reported in August 2026, placed revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. ReelShort’s revenue comes to $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA projects $1.05 billion in 2026, witsi88h about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in MPA’s 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.

Reading the Timeline Forward

Lined up end to end, the milestones show several patterns. The first is that the overseas b88vusiness still looks limited compared with its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second is a likely cooling of growth, with Sensor Tower placing 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 took in about $140 million in that quarter, which means competition at the top has grown closer as well. Monetization has taken on a consistent shape, and a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such asSEXXXXX-VN ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama as of September 2026, although prices vary by platform, country and promotion. Production is the area 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. 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.