A One-Handed Format: Duanju at Home

Instead of a company, the history of Chinese short drama starts with a screen format. The Chinese word duanju, which “short drama” translates literally, describes vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. Each episode plays for between one and two minutes, while a single title generally spans 20 to 100 episodes. The storylines lean on a dependable stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family conflict and hidden-identity reveals. Each of those setups can be grasped in seconds, which https://fastdrama.net/series/the-alpha-s-captive-mate/ counts for a lot when a whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. Traditional television rarely had to ask how to sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time, but viewed as a business, the format settles exactly that question. The same product now greets English-speaking audiences under other labels, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Every stage of the timeline that follows is tied together by that pay-per-piece logic.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

It is an administrative milestone, not a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, the NRTA, China’s regulator, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. The step carries more weight than it might appear: recognition converts a loose category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. Because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, later figures about the sector are able to be compared at all. For a nascent industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. Short drama was pushed from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters was what that data showed four years later.

2024: The Year Short Drama Out-Earned the Box Office

For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, consider the home-market figures for 2024. In China, short drama income came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to data published in mid-2025. It marked the first time the sector earned more than China’s box office: a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. In 2024, producers released more than 30,000 titles. Estimates put the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. That volume is as telling about the industry’s makeup as the revenue is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. Intense competition is suggested too, since every one of those titles competes for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Still, the push abroad had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort went live in August 2022 and was first out of the gate. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox followed in April 2023; it is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly connected 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 officially announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name. DramaWave, released through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The repeating pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. That corporate map is largely invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who instead see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

What to put in the apps became the strategic question after they existed. According to a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by leaning heavily on its home 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 the 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 a rich domestic library, because it extends the life of titles that have already been paid for. While Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, they reach the audience without a translation layer. Back in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US; the audience, in other words, is well defined. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis appear in the library of DramaBox, which runs a production team in Los Angeles. Most notably, Holywater shows that the originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots; its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025, plus a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Report

By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures vary in revealing ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States accounting for 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 quote slightly different totals. Omdia offers a wider view, estimating total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and predicting $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 put 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 stands at $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA forecasts $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 at about 29 percent outside China, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, roughly 69 percent in total for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Forward

Put the milestones end to end and a few patterns become clear. The first pattern is about scale: the overseas business still looks small next to its origin, as Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second is a likely slowing 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. The race at the top has grown closer as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on 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 produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. No matter whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase, the product remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.