Enjoy ReelShort Collection Now Hot New Releases

A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil

Chinese short drama’s tale starts with a format instead of a corporation. “Short drama” is the literal translation of the Chinese term duanju, a word that describes vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one www.reelshorts.org/where-to-watch/rebel-in-devil-s-shackle hand. A single title usually runs to 20 to 100 instalments, with episodes playing for between one and two minutes. Writers’ storylines are drawn from a proven stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family feuds and hidden-identity reveals. Each one of those premises can be understood in seconds, and that is crucial when a whole episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb moves on. Seen as a business, the format solves a question traditional television rarely had to ask, that is, how to sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. That same product now greets English-speaking audiences under other labels, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic threads through every stage of the timeline that follows.

2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre

The first milestone turns out to be administrative, not a commercial one. Back in 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. That move counts more than it might seem, because recognition transforms a fuzzy category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. Later figures about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be monitored from one year to the next. Business success was not guaranteed by any of this, and for a new industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways. What it did do was push 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 revealed four years later.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

The home-market figures for 2024 are the plainest measure of how far the format had come. Data published in mid-2025 placed 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 made of one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was estimated at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, producers rolled out more than 30,000 titles. That volume is as telling about the industry’s structure as the revenue figure is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. Every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also suggests intense competition. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad, because the overseas push had not waited for this milestone.

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

ReelShort debuted in August 2022 and was first off the line. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox followed, made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. In June 2023 GoodShort debuted under Singapore New Reading Technology; that company is reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, though no rename has been formally announced. DramaWave, published 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. Again and again, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronts a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. What people who watch dramas online in English actually see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; the corporate map is largely invisible from where they sit.

Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals

The strategic question, after the apps existed, was what to put in them. According to a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by relying heavily on its home catalogue. The company had produced more than 600 mini-dramas 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. Dubbing stretches the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes clear sense for a company with a rich domestic library. Western originals are more expensive: TheWrap quotes $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. Still, 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. DramaBox operates a production team in Los Angeles, and its library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. The originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots, most visibly Holywater, whose My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 along with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers’ Numbers

By 2025 several research firms were tracking the overseas business, and their figures vary in instructive ways. The United States supplied 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower put at about $700 million. Sensor Tower’s data puts whole-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, although different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals. Omdia takes a wider 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 reach $1.5 billion in 2026, which would be half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 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. MPA puts 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.

Where the Timeline Points Next

Lay the milestones end to end and a few patterns become clear. 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 next to its origin. Second, growth is likely cooling: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year. The contest at the top has grown tighter 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 familiar shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. 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, which makes production the area most likely to change next. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, remains the core offer whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.