Tag: free episodes

A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju at Home

It is a format, not a company, that begins the tale of Chinese short drama. Rendered literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it describes vertical series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in a single hand. Each episode runs from one to two minutes, while a single title usually runs to 20 to 100 instalments. A trusty set of reelshorts tv premises drives the stories: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family conflict and identity reveals. A whole episode has to connect before the viewer’s thumb swipes away, so it matters that every one of those premises can be understood in seconds. How can you sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time? Traditional television hardly ever had to ask that question, but considered as a business, the format answers it. That same product now greets English-speaking audiences under other labels, such as 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 first milestone. Back in 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, formally recognized duanju as a genre. Because recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, the step matters more than it might seem. A genre with a name can be tracked from one year to the next, which is what allows later statistics about the sector to be compared at all. For a fledgling industry, regulatory attention can cut both ways, and none of this assured commercial success. What it did was shift short drama from the edges of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. A sector big enough to be measured against the country’s cinemas is what that data revealed four years later.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, turn to the domestic figures for 2024. According to data made public in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China reached 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. It was the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office, a headline crossover for an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes. Figures placed the audience that year at 662 million viewers. Over the same twelve months, producers put out more than 30,000 titles. The volume is as revealing about the industry’s structure as the revenue figure is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. The volume also implies fierce competition: every one of those titles is competing 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 offering the same model abroad by 2024.

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

ReelShort came first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. The app is operated by Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, and the studio is backed by China-based COL Group. Next came DramaBox in April 2023. Beijing Dianzhong Technology develops it, and StoryMatrix, the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. Singapore New Reading Technology launched GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a less solid source. Jiuzhou Culture introduced ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under a different name, though no rename has been officially announced. Kunlun Tech joined in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. Again and again, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronts a business whose capital or parentage leads back to China. Most of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: all they notice is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals

The strategic question, after the apps existed, was what to put in them. According to a China Daily report from January 2024, Jiuzhou answered by relying heavily on its home catalogue. 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. Dubbing makes clear sense for a company with an extensive domestic library, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals reach the audience without a translation layer, but they cost more, 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. With a production team in Los Angeles, DramaBox offers titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis in its catalogue. Companies without Chinese roots have also been attracted to the originals market. The best-known is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app secured an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, plus a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Say

By 2025 the overseas business was being tracked by several research firms, and their figures diverge in useful 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 supplying 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. A wider 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. Half of all revenue outside China, $1.5 billion, is the amount Omdia also expects the US to reach in 2026. 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. For ReelShort, MPA estimates revenue at $785 million in 2025 and projects $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, then 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

Laid end to end, the milestones show several clear patterns. Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China, which gives the first pattern: the overseas business still looks small beside its origin. Second, growth is likely slowing: after triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower places the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year. At the top, competition has grown tighter too: DramaBox and ReelShort each earned about $140 million in that quarter. Prices vary by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has settled into 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, because DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly creates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. No matter whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output take the next phase, the product is still the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.