Watch Short Dramas Clips Now Fan Favorite Series

A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market

Chinese short drama’s history starts with a screen format instead of a firm. “Short drama” is the literal translation of the Chinese term duanju, a word that describes upright series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. The episodes run one to two minutes, and a single title typically stretches across 20 to 100 instalments. The storylines pull from a reliable stock of premises: short drama hub billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family feuds and identity reveals. Being understandable in seconds counts for every one of those setups, because an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. Viewed as a business, the format answers a question conventional television hardly ever had to ask, in other words how to sell a story in portions small enough to price one at a time. English-language audiences now run into the same product under other tags, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Through every stage of the timeline that follows, this pay-per-piece logic is the common thread.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

The opening milestone is administrative rather than commercial. In 2020, duanju was formally acknowledged as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. Because recognition turns a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, that step matters more than it might seem. Following a named genre from one year to the next is feasible, and that is what allows later figures about the sector to be compared at all. For a fledgling industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. It did, however, shift short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years on, that data showed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s film theaters.

2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office

How far the format had come is captured most clearly by the domestic numbers for 2024. Figures published in mid-2025 put short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a telling crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. More than 30,000 titles were released in 2024. Over the same twelve months, the audience was placed at 662 million viewers. That volume tells as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does, because a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. The volume also points to fierce competition: every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. However, the push abroad had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.

Going Abroad: The Chinese-Linked Apps Driving 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 backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox, developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix, followed in April 2023. GoodShort launched 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. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, together with 99TV for Southeast Asia. The evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, although no rename has been officially announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech came in with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. The pattern that keeps recurring is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting 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: what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

What to stock the apps with became the strategic question after they existed. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its home library. 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 placed at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes clear sense for a company with an extensive domestic library, because it stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals cost more to make, 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 specific: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company operates a production team in Los Angeles. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also drawn in firms without them, most visibly Holywater, whose 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 the Market Trackers Report

By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures vary in instructive 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 contributing 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, though different reports of the same dataset give 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 projecting $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, which would be half of all revenue outside China. Figures from Media Partners Asia, reported in August 2026, put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. MPA estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, its market-share estimates are the most telling: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, or roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.

Looking Ahead Along the Timeline

Laid end to end, the milestones reveal a few patterns. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which gives the first pattern: the overseas business still looks modest beside its origin. Second, growth is likely easing: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year. Among the leaders, competition has tightened too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled into a familiar 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. Production is the area most likely to change next: DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $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 win the next phase, the product is still the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.