Short Reels Romance Guide 2026 Must See Series

A Format Built for One Hand: Duanju Where It Began

It is a format, rather than a company, that begins the history of Chinese short drama. Rendered literally, the Chinese term duanju means “short drama”, and it describes vertical shows composed at 9:16 short reels for a phone held in a single hand. An episode runs one to two minutes, while a single title generally stretches across 20 to 100 instalments. The stories lean on a reliable menu of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family feuds and identity reveals. All of these setups can be followed in seconds, which matters when a complete episode has to land before the viewer’s thumb scrolls on. From a business angle, the format answers a question that traditional television hardly ever faced: how does one sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time. Under other labels, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-language audiences now find the same product. That pay-per-piece logic is the thread running through every stage of the timeline below.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

The earliest milestone is regulatory rather than commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially acknowledged duanju as a genre. Since recognition turns a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and supervised, the step matters more than it might seem. Later figures about the sector can be compared at all only because a named genre can be followed from one year to the next. None of this ensured commercial success, and regulatory attention can cut both ways for a young industry. What it did do was move short drama from the edges 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 movie theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Overtook the Box Office

For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, look at the home-market figures for 2024. According to data released in mid-2025, short drama revenue in China came to 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 built on one- and two-minute episodes. More than 30,000 titles came out that year. Over the same twelve months, the audience was put at 662 million viewers. The volume is as informative about the industry’s makeup as the revenue figure is: a business putting out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. Every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also suggests fierce competition. The drive abroad, however, had not waited for this milestone, and by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort launched in August 2022 and was first off the line. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is supported by China-based COL Group. DramaBox came next in April 2023; it is built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. GoodShort appeared in June 2023 under Singapore New Reading Technology, a company reportedly connected to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a thinner source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and the evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under a different name, even though no rename has been formally announced. Kunlun Tech entered in September 2024 with DramaWave, published through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. Over and over, a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong stands in front of a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. Most of that corporate map is invisible to people who watch dramas online in English: what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports Versus Western Originals

The key strategic question, after the apps existed, was what to fill them with. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer leaned heavily on its home 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. Per the same report, a 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes good sense for a company with a rich domestic library, because it prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals cost more, with TheWrap quoting $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 maintains a production team in Los Angeles, and its catalogue includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Companies without Chinese roots have also been attracted to the originals market. The most prominent is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, together with a Fox commitment to make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: The Market Trackers’ Numbers

By 2025 the overseas business was being tracked by several research firms, and their figures vary in telling ways. The United States contributed 49 percent, or roughly $350 million, of worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps in the first quarter of 2025, which Sensor Tower put at about $700 million. Sensor Tower’s data puts whole-year in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent, although different reports of the same dataset quote slightly different totals. Omdia offers 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 projects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, which would be 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 pegs ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, MPA’s market-share estimates are the most instructive: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, roughly 69 percent in total for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Into the Future

A few patterns stand out when the milestones are lined up 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 small beside its origin. After triple-digit growth across 2025, Sensor Tower puts 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. Competition at the top has grown closer as well, with DramaBox and ReelShort each earning about $140 million in that quarter. The way these apps make money has settled into a recognizable shape: for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026, though prices vary by country, platform and promotion. Production is the area most likely to change next: DramaWave, whose annualized revenue exceeded $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly creates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. 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.