Drama App Episodes Basics Micro Drama Roundup

A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began

Rather than a corporation, the history of Chinese short drama begins with a format. The Chinese word duanju, which “short drama” translates word for word, names vertical series framed at 9:16 mini drama app for a handset held in one hand. The episodes last from one to two minutes, and a single title typically stretches over 20 to 100 installments. A trusty stock of premises feeds the storylines: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family feuds. Being graspable in seconds matters for each of those setups, because a whole episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. As a business, the format tackles a question that regular television hardly ever needed to ask: how can you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. Microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama are some of the other terms under which English-speaking audiences now meet the same product. That pay-per-piece logic is the thread running through every stage of the timeline ahead.

2020: The NRTA Formally Recognizes the Genre

The earliest milestone is administrative, not a commercial one. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. That step is more important than it might appear: recognition converts a fuzzy category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. An officially named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, which is what allows later figures about the sector to be compared at all. Commercial success was not assured by any of this, and for a young industry, a regulator’s attention can cut both ways. Short drama was moved from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, that data pointed to a sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

The figures from inside China for 2024 are the most obvious measure of how far the format had come. According to figures published in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a symbolic crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. The viewership that year was placed at 662 million viewers. Producers put out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. A business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is trialing premises at scale, so that output reveals as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. Stiff competition is signaled too, since every one of those titles competes for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The overseas push had not, however, waited for this milestone; several Chinese-linked companies were already selling the same model abroad by 2024.

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

First out of the gate was ReelShort, which launched in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, operates the app, and China-based COL Group supports the studio. DramaBox arrived next in April 2023; it is made 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, though that parent link rests on a less solid source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, plus 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 joined the field with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business, and according to Sensor Tower its 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. What people who watch dramas online in English see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; the corporate map is largely invisible to them.

Dubbed Imports vs. Western Originals

The key strategic question, after the apps existed, was what to put in them. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its domestic 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 placed at $100,000 to $150,000. For a company with a deep domestic library, dubbing makes plain sense, because it extends the life of titles already paid for. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they cost more, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. 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. DramaBox’s lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company operates a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been pulled into the originals market. The most visible is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, together with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Show

The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their estimates differ in instructive ways. In the first quarter of 2025, global in-app revenue for short-drama apps stood at about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Different reports of the same dataset quote 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. A broader view comes from Omdia, which estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, including $3 billion earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also expects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, or half of all revenue outside China. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia pegged 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; for 2026 it projects $1.05 billion, 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, 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 Ahead

When the milestones are lined up end to end, a few patterns stand out. The first pattern is one of scale: the overseas business still looks modest next to its origin, because Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. Second, growth is likely slowing: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year. Among the leaders, competition has grown tighter too: DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter. Prices vary 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 such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. Production is the area most likely to change next, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue exceeded $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, stays the product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.