Enjoy Short Reels Shorts Now Pros and Cons

A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil

It’s a screen format, rather than a company, that begins the story of Chinese short drama. Taken literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it describes vertical series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. An episode lasts one to two minutes, while a single title usually spans short reels free 20 to 100 installments. The plots are drawn from a dependable set of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family strife. A complete episode has to connect before the viewer’s thumb swipes away, so it helps a great deal that every one of those setups can be grasped in seconds. Commercially speaking, the format answers a question that traditional television hardly ever needed to ask: how can you sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. Viewers in English-speaking markets now come across the same product under other labels, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic runs through every stage of the chronology ahead.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

Administrative rather than commercial: that is how to describe the first milestone. In 2020, duanju was officially acknowledged as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. Recognition turns a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, which is why this move matters more than it might appear. Because a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, later figures about the sector can be compared at all. A regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a young industry, and nothing about this guaranteed commercial success. Short drama was pushed from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, pointed to a sector big enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.

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 reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to numbers made public in mid-2025. It was the first year the sector out-earned China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. More than 30,000 titles were released in 2024. The viewership over the same twelve months was estimated at 662 million viewers. That sheer volume says as much about the industry’s makeup as the revenue does, because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. It also implies fierce competition, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad, as the push abroad had not waited for this milestone.

Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Behind the Export Wave

ReelShort was first out of the gate, going live in August 2022. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox came next in April 2023; it is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name, though no rename has been officially announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech joined the field with DramaWave, which it published through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower the company’s FreeReels app topped 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 largely invisible; what they see 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 fill them with. Per a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou responded by relying 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. In that same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was placed at $100,000 to $150,000. Since dubbing extends the life of titles that have already been paid for, it makes obvious sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $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 distinct: TheWrap reported in October 2024 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 maintains a production team in Los Angeles. The originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots, most prominently 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: The Market Trackers’ Numbers

By 2025 the overseas business was being followed by several research firms, and their figures differ in instructive ways. In the first quarter of 2025, global 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. Different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals, but for the full year Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent. Omdia offers a broader 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. Estimates 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. ReelShort’s revenue comes to $785 million in 2025 by MPA’s estimate, and MPA forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Its market-share estimates are the most telling for this timeline: 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 Into the Future

Several patterns stand out when the milestones are laid end to end. 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. At the top, competition has tightened too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has settled into 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. 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, so production is the area most likely to change next. 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.