Through Ashes Their Sorrow Videos FAQ Feature Breakdown

A Format Designed for a Single Hand: Duanju on Home Soil

Instead of a corporation, the story of Chinese short drama starts with a format. “Short drama” is the literal translation of the Chinese term duanju, which describes vertical series framed at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. A single title usually spans 20 to 100 episodes, with each episode running between one and two minutes. A reliable stock of premises drives the stories: billionaire Through Ashes Their Sorrow Awakens drama and CEO romance, revenge, family conflict and hidden-identity reveals. Being understandable in seconds counts for every one of those premises, because an entire episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb moves on. Conventional television seldom had to ask how to sell a story in chunks small enough to price one at a time, but seen as a business, the format solves exactly that question. Under other labels, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama, English-language audiences now meet the same product. Through every stage of the timeline below, this pay-per-piece logic is the connecting thread.

2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map

It is an administrative milestone, rather than a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, duanju was formally acknowledged as a genre by China’s regulator, the NRTA. The step matters more than it might look: recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. Since a named genre can be followed from one year to the next, later figures about the sector can be compared at all. Commercial success was not ensured by any of this, and for a new industry, attention from a regulator can cut both ways. Short drama was pushed from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years afterward, that data revealed a sector large enough to be measured against the country’s film theaters.

2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

Nothing shows how far the format had come more clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. In China, short drama income hit 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, going by figures published in mid-2025. For an industry built on one- and two-minute episodes, it was a telling crossover: the first year the sector earned more than China’s box office. Producers released more than 30,000 titles in 2024. Figures placed the audience over the same twelve months at 662 million viewers. This volume says 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 points to fierce competition: every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. The push overseas, 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 Behind the Export Wave

ReelShort came first out of the gate, debuting in August 2022. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. Next up came DramaBox in April 2023. It is developed by Beijing Dianzhong Technology, and StoryMatrix, that company’s Singapore subsidiary, owns it. Singapore New Reading Technology brought out GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, although that parent link rests on a weaker source. Jiuzhou Culture launched 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. DramaWave, published through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and the company’s FreeReels app topped global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. What recurs is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong in front of a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. This corporate map is mostly invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

Once the apps were in place, the key strategic question became what to stock them with. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, relied heavily on its home catalogue. About 80 percent of the more than 600 mini-dramas it had produced for overseas markets were dubbed Chinese adaptations, and 20 percent were original overseas productions. A 70-episode series cost $100,000 to $150,000 in the view of the same report. Dubbing prolongs the life of titles that have already been paid for, so it makes clear sense for a company with a large domestic library. Although Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, they reach the audience without a translation layer. This audience is specific: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. Titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis sit in the catalogue of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been pulled 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 make more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What Market Trackers Report

By 2025 several research firms were following the overseas business, and their figures vary in instructive ways. The United States accounted for 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. 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 cite slightly different totals. A broader 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. Omdia also anticipates the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. Figures from Media Partners Asia, reported in August 2026, placed 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; for 2026 it forecasts $1.05 billion, with about $40 million in net profit. The most telling figures for this timeline are 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.

Reading the Timeline Forward

Lined up end to end, the milestones reveal several clear patterns. The first point is one of scale: the overseas business still looks small beside its origin, because Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second is a likely slowing of growth, with Sensor Tower placing the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. With DramaBox and ReelShort each bringing in about $140 million in that quarter, competition at the top has tightened as well. Monetization has taken on a recognizable shape. As of September 2026, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps including ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama, though prices vary by platform, country and promotion. DramaWave, whose annualized revenue topped $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly produces more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, which makes production the area most likely to change next. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, stays the product whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.