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Discover Short Dramas Originals Tips and Tricks

Posted by Alexander on October 30th, 2026 (Uncategorized)

A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju in Its Home Market

Chinese short drama’s story starts with a screen format and not with a firm. “Short drama” is the literal translation of duanju, a term for vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one hand. Every episode lasts from one to two minutes, while a single title usually stretches across 20 to 100 installments. The plots rely on a dependable, well-worn stock of premises: revenge, billionaire and CEO romance, identity reveals and family strife. Every one of those premises can be grasped in seconds, and that is crucial when a short dramas online whole episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb moves on. How do you sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time? Traditional television seldom had to ask that question, but considered as a business, the format answers it. That same product now greets English-language audiences under other names, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic is the thread running through every stage of the timeline ahead.

2020: The NRTA Makes the Genre Official

It is an administrative milestone, not a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, duanju was formally recognized as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. Because recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, that step matters more than it might seem. Tracking a named genre from one year to the next is possible, and that is what enables later figures about the sector to be compared at all. None of it assured commercial success, and attention from a regulator can cut both ways for a young industry. The effect was to move short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, that data revealed a sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

For a clear measure of how far the format had come, look at the home-market figures for 2024. Short drama revenue in China came to 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion, according to data made public in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector earned more than China’s box office, a telling crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. Estimates put the viewership that year at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles arrived over the same twelve months. The volume is as revealing about the industry’s structure as the revenue is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale. Stiff competition is suggested too, as 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.

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

ReelShort launched in August 2022 and was first off the line. Behind the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is backed by China-based COL Group. Next up came DramaBox in April 2023. Its developer is Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a thinner source. Besides 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture rolled out ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been formally announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name. DramaWave, published through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. What keeps recurring is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong in front of a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. What people who watch dramas online in English see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; that corporate map is largely invisible to them.

Operator	Service	Chinese tie	Launch date
Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California)	ReelShort	Backed by China-based COL Group	August 2022
StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore)	DramaBox	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; the two names seem to be one app	September 2023
SKYWORK AI PTE LTD	DramaWave	Part of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business	September 2024
Kunlun Tech	FreeReels	An app from Kunlun Tech	Unconfirmed; led global downloads in Q1 2026
Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020)	My Drama	None; Fox Entertainment has held a stake since October 2025	Spring 2024

Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals

After the apps existed, the strategic question became what to fill them with. Per a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by drawing heavily on its domestic catalogue. It had made more than 600 mini-dramas for overseas markets: about 80 percent of them were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent of them were original overseas productions. That same report pegged the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes obvious sense for a company with a deep domestic library. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. That audience is well defined: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox has a production team in Los Angeles, and its library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. The originals market has also pulled in companies without Chinese roots, most prominently Holywater, whose My Drama app took 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 Show

By 2025 the overseas business was being monitored by several research firms, and their figures diverge in revealing ways. The United States supplied 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of global in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower pegged at about $700 million. Different reports of the same dataset give slightly different totals, but for the full year Sensor Tower’s data places 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 projecting $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. In estimates reported in August 2026, Media Partners Asia 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 at $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. The most telling figures for this timeline are MPA’s market-share estimates: 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.

Where the Timeline Points Next

Several patterns become clear when the milestones are set end to end. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which points to the first pattern: the overseas business still looks modest beside its origin. 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. The race at the top has grown tighter as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled on a familiar 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. The area most likely to change next is production, since 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. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, stays the core offer whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.

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