Watch Short Reels Dramas Now Everything Explained

A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju Where It Began

It is a format, not a corporation, that begins the history of Chinese short drama. Duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, stands for vertical-format series set at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. A single title generally spans 20 to 100 instalments, with episodes lasting one to two minutes. The stories draw on a dependable, well-worn menu of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, family conflict and reels-short.com/series/claimed-by-the-ruthless-alpha identity reveals. Being understandable in seconds is important for every one of those premises, because a whole episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. Seen as a business, the format answers a question traditional television hardly ever had to ask, specifically how to sell a story in fragments small enough to price one at a time. The very same product now meets English-language audiences under other terms, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. Across every stage of the timeline that follows, that pay-per-piece logic is the thread.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

Administrative rather than commercial: that is how to describe the earliest milestone. Back in 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. That move counts more than it might look, because recognition transforms a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised. Since a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, later numbers about the sector are able to be compared at all. Business success was not ensured by any of this, and for a young industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways. What it did was shift short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector large enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters is what that data showed four years later.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, consider the home-market figures for 2024. According to figures released 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 telling crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. The audience that year was put at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles arrived over the same twelve months. That volume reveals as much about the industry’s shape as the revenue does, because a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. It also signals heavy competition, since every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. Even so, the push abroad had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort was first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, runs it, and China-based COL Group supports the studio. In April 2023 DramaBox arrived, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, which is reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a less solid 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 another name, though no rename has been officially announced. In September 2024, Kunlun Tech came in 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. Again and again, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronts a business whose capital or parentage traces 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; that corporate map is largely invisible from where they sit.

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

As soon as the apps existed, the strategic question became what to fill them with. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its domestic library. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had produced for overseas markets, about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. That same report set the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Because dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, it makes clear sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Western originals cost more: TheWrap quotes $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, which shows that this audience is specific. DramaBox has a production team in Los Angeles, and its lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. The originals market has also drawn in companies without Chinese roots, most notably Holywater, whose My Drama app secured 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. 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 accounting for 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Different reports of the same dataset cite 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 takes a broader view: it puts total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasts $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also projects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, or half of all revenue outside China. Figures 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. For ReelShort, MPA estimates revenue of $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. Nothing in MPA’s work is more telling for this timeline than its market-share estimates: 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

When the milestones are laid end to end, several patterns stand out. The first point is about scale: the overseas business still looks small beside its origin, as Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year over year, which points to the second pattern, a likely slowing of growth. DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter, which means competition at the top has grown closer as well. Prices vary by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on a familiar 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. Production is the area most likely to change next: 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. 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.