ReelShort Hits Ratings Vertical Drama Picks
A One-Handed Format: Duanju at Home
The story of Chinese short drama opens with a format rather than a corporation. Duanju, the Chinese term that «short drama» translates literally, refers to vertical-format series composed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. Episodes last from one to two minutes, and a single title normally spans reelshorts.org/where-to-watch/becoming-princess 20 to 100 instalments. The storylines are drawn from a reliable kit of premises: tales of revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family strife. Each of these premises can be followed in seconds, which is important when a complete episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. From a business angle, the format answers a question that traditional television seldom needed to ask: how can you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time. The very same product now greets English-language audiences under other labels, among them microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Each stage of the timeline that follows is held together by that pay-per-piece logic.
2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Map
Administrative rather than commercial: that is how to describe the earliest milestone. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially recognized duanju as a genre. The step matters more than it might seem, because recognition transforms a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. A genre with a name can be followed from one year to the next, which is what enables later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. Business success was not guaranteed by any of this, and for a new industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways. It did, however, push short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, revealed a sector big enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.
2024: The Year Short Drama Out-Earned the Box Office
Nothing captures how far the format had come as clearly than the domestic figures for 2024. According to figures published in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. For the first time, the sector out-earned China’s box office, a landmark crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. The viewership that year was placed at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, studios rolled out more than 30,000 titles. That output is as telling about the industry’s structure as the revenue figure is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. It also points to intense competition, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The push abroad had not, however, waited for this milestone; several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad by 2024.
Heading Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Powering the Export Wave
First to launch was ReelShort, which debuted in August 2022. It is run by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is backed by China-based COL Group. DramaBox followed in April 2023; it is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort arrived in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, a company 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 came in with DramaWave, 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. A business whose capital or parentage traces back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the recurring pattern. That corporate map is largely invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who instead see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.
| Operating company | App | Chinese tie | Debut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | Backed by China-based COL Group | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | A Singapore subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly a part of Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; both names appear to belong to one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | A unit of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | Kunlun Tech app | Not confirmed; highest global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No Chinese link; Fox Entertainment stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals
After the apps existed, the strategic question became what to put in them. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer drew heavily on its home library. It had produced more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent of them were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 according to the same report. Because dubbing prolongs the life of titles already paid for, it makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library. Western originals cost more to make, with TheWrap reporting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but they reach the audience without a translation layer. TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US, so that audience is specific. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company runs a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been drawn into the originals market. The most visible is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, plus a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers’ Numbers
The overseas business was drawing the attention of several research firms by 2025, and their figures diverge in revealing ways. Sensor Tower put 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. For the full year, Sensor Tower’s data places in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, and 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 projecting $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, or half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia, in estimates reported in August 2026, 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 and expects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, MPA’s market-share estimates are the most revealing: 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.
Looking Ahead Along the Timeline
When the milestones are placed end to end, a few patterns stand out. The first is that the overseas business still looks limited next to its origin, since 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 on year. With DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter, the contest at the top has tightened as well. Monetization has settled into a recognizable shape. As of September 2026, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, though prices vary by country, platform 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 produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. The product remains the one duanju producers built at home, a story sold a minute at a time, whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.