Inside Short Form Streaming Drama No Cost to Start

A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju at Home

Rather than a company, the story of Chinese short drama begins with a format. Duanju, the Chinese term that «short drama» translates literally, stands for vertical series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. Every episode runs from one to two minutes, while a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 installments. The stories rely on a trusty toolkit of premises: revenge, short form streaming billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family strife. Being understandable in seconds counts for each of those premises, because an entire episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. How do you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time? Regular television seldom had to ask that question, but considered as a business, the format settles it. Under different names, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-speaking audiences now find the same product. This pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the chronology that follows.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

It is an administrative milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, duanju was officially acknowledged as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. This move is more important than it might look: recognition converts a fuzzy category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. A named genre can be followed from one year to the next, which is what lets later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. For a nascent industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways, and none of this guaranteed commercial success. What it did do was move short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, the data revealed a sector big enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.

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

The home-market figures for 2024 are the most obvious measure of how far the format had come. In China, short drama income reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to figures released in mid-2025. For an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a symbolic crossover: the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office. Figures placed the viewership that year at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, production companies rolled out more than 30,000 titles. The volume is as revealing about the industry’s structure as the revenue figure is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. It also signals intense competition, since 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 offering the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. Its operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox came next in April 2023; it is built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. Singapore New Reading Technology brought out GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a weaker source. In addition to 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture launched 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. Kunlun Tech arrived in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business; according to Sensor Tower, its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026. What recurs is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage goes back to China. For people who watch dramas online in English, that corporate map is mostly invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

With the apps in place, the big strategic question turned to what to stock them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its domestic catalogue. 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. The same report pegged the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. While Western originals cost more, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, they reach the audience without a translation layer. This audience is distinct: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis appear in the catalogue of DramaBox, which runs a production team in Los Angeles. Most visibly, 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 the Market Trackers Say

The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures differ in telling ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps was estimated at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States supplying 49 percent, or roughly $350 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 cite slightly different totals. Taking a broader view, Omdia estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. Estimates from Media Partners Asia, 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. MPA estimates ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and expects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Its 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 Into the Future

Line up the milestones end to end and several patterns emerge. The first is that the overseas business still looks small compared with its origin, since 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. As DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter, the contest at the top has tightened as well. Monetization has settled on a consistent shape, and a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as 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, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue passed $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output claim the next phase, the product is still the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.