Watch Ruling Over All I See Shows Now What to Know First

A Format Shaped for One Hand: Duanju on Home Soil

Rather than a corporation, the story of Chinese short drama begins with a screen format. Taken literally, the Chinese term duanju translates as “short drama”, and it covers upright series shot at 9:16 for a phone held in one hand. With episodes lasting between one and two minutes, a single Ruling Over All I See title typically stretches across 20 to 100 episodes. The stories draw on a reliable set of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge, hidden-identity reveals and family conflict. Each such setup can be understood in seconds, which counts for a lot when a complete episode has to make its point before the viewer’s thumb flicks onward. In business terms, the format tackles a question that conventional television hardly ever needed to ask: how does one sell a story in pieces small enough to price one at a time. The same product now meets English-speaking audiences under other names, including microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic connects every stage of the chronology that follows.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

It is an administrative milestone, not a commercial one, that comes first. In 2020, duanju was formally acknowledged as a genre by the Chinese regulator, the NRTA. That step counts more than it might look, because recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be counted, classified and supervised. A named genre can be monitored from one year to the next, which is what enables later figures about the sector to be compared at all. None of this promised commercial success, and a regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a new industry. Short drama was pushed from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. That data, four years later, showed a sector sizable enough to be measured against the country’s movie theaters.

2024: When Short Drama Outearned the Box Office

Nothing measures how far the format had come more clearly than the home-market figures for 2024. Numbers published in mid-2025 put short drama revenue in China at 50.5 billion yuan, or about $7 billion. That was the first year the sector brought in more than China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry founded on one- and two-minute episodes. That year, the audience was pegged at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles arrived over the same twelve months. A business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale, so that output says as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. Every one of those titles is vying for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day, which also signals intense competition. Even so, the push abroad had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already marketing the same model abroad.

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

ReelShort launched in August 2022 and was first out of the gate. The app’s operator is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, a studio supported by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox arrived, built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. In June 2023 GoodShort arrived under Singapore New Reading Technology; the company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, but that parent link rests on a less solid source. Besides 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV for the United States, Canada and Australia; no rename has been officially announced, but the evidence suggests ShortMax is the same app under another name. 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. A business whose capital or parentage leads back to China, fronted by a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong: that is the repeating pattern. This corporate map is largely invisible to people who watch dramas online in English, who instead see a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Operator	Service	Chinese tie	Launch
Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California)	ReelShort	Backing from China-based COL Group	August 2022
StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore)	DramaBox	Singapore 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 appear to be a single app	September 2023
SKYWORK AI PTE LTD	DramaWave	Part of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business	September 2024
Kunlun Tech	FreeReels	App owned by Kunlun Tech	Not officially confirmed; highest global downloads in Q1 2026
Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020)	My Drama	No Chinese link; Fox Entertainment stake since October 2025	Spring 2024

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

The key strategic question, once the apps existed, was what to fill them with. As China Daily reported in January 2024, Jiuzhou’s answer drew 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 put the cost of a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000. Dubbing makes clear sense for a company with a deep domestic library, because it extends 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 quoting $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days. That audience is clearly defined: TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. DramaBox’s library includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis, and the company maintains a production team in Los Angeles. Companies without Chinese roots have also been pulled into the originals market. The best-known is Holywater: in October 2025 its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment, along with 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 followed by several research firms, and their figures diverge in telling ways. In the first quarter of 2025, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps came to about $700 million, according to Sensor Tower, with the United States contributing 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. Across the whole year, Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent; different reports of the same dataset cite 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 expects the US to hit $1.5 billion in 2026, which would be half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia placed revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031 in estimates reported in August 2026. MPA estimates ReelShort’s 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: about 29 percent outside China for ReelShort, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, or roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.

Reading the Timeline Into the Future

When the milestones are laid end to end, several patterns emerge. The first pattern is about scale: the overseas business still looks modest beside its origin, since Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second is a likely easing of growth, with Sensor Tower putting the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. At the top, competition has grown closer too: DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter. Monetization has settled into a familiar 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. 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, so production is the area most likely to change next. A story sold a minute at a time, the product duanju producers built at home, remains the core offer whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase.