Enjoy Watch The Senator s Son Episodes Now What to Know First

A Format Made for One Hand: Duanju at Home

Instead of a corporation, the history of Chinese short drama begins with a format. The word duanju, the Chinese term that “short drama” translates literally, refers to vertical shows shot at 9:16 for a phone gripped in one hand. The episodes last between one and two minutes, and a single title typically extends across 20 to 100 instalments. The plots build on a proven set of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family feuds and identity reveals. Being graspable in seconds watch The Senator’s Son counts for every one of those premises, because an entire episode has to hit home before the viewer’s thumb swipes away. How can you sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time? Traditional television seldom had to ask that question, but considered as a business, the format solves it. The very same product now reaches English-language audiences under other terms, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. This pay-per-piece logic threads through every stage of the timeline ahead.

2020: The NRTA Gives the Genre Official Standing

The first milestone is administrative, not commercial. In 2020, China’s regulator, the NRTA, officially recognized duanju as a genre. The step counts more than it might appear, because recognition transforms a shapeless category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen. Because a named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, later statistics about the sector are able to be compared at all. Regulatory attention can cut both ways for a young industry, and none of this assured commercial success. It did, push short drama from the fringes of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, the data showed a sector big enough to stand comparison against the country’s cinemas.

2024: Short Drama Earns More Than the Box Office

For the clearest measure of how far the format had come, look at the domestic figures for 2024. In China, short drama income reached 50.5 billion yuan, which is about $7 billion, according to figures published in mid-2025. It marked the first time the sector brought in more than China’s box office: a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. The audience that year was put at 662 million viewers. More than 30,000 titles came out over the same twelve months. A business rolling out tens of thousands of titles a year is testing premises at scale, so this volume reveals as much about the industry’s structure as the revenue does. It also suggests fierce competition, since every one of those titles is competing for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. By 2024, however, several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad, since the overseas push had not waited for this milestone.

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

First out of the gate was ReelShort, which debuted in August 2022. Running the app is Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, which is backed by China-based COL Group. In April 2023 DramaBox arrived, made by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by the developer’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. Singapore New Reading Technology brought out GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly tied to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. Alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, Jiuzhou Culture introduced 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. DramaWave, published through Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business, marked the company’s entry in September 2024, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The common thread is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting for a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. For people who watch dramas online in English, that corporate map is largely invisible; what they see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall.

Dubbed Imports or Western Originals

After the apps existed, the strategic question became what to put in them. In January 2024, China Daily reported that Jiuzhou’s answer relied heavily on its domestic 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 good sense for a company with a deep domestic library, because it extends the life of titles that have already been paid for. Western originals cost more, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, but they reach the audience without a translation layer. That audience is distinct: in October 2024, TheWrap reported that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US. Series such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis sit in the library of DramaBox, which operates a production team in Los Angeles. Not every player has Chinese roots: the originals market has also attracted companies without them, most visibly Holywater, whose My Drama app received an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025 along with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.

2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Show

By 2025 the overseas business was being followed by several research firms, and their figures differ in useful 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 estimated at about $700 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. Taking a wider view, Omdia estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, $3 billion of it earned outside China, and forecasts $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. Figures from Media Partners Asia, reported in August 2026, put 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 projects $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. MPA’s market-share estimates are the most telling for this timeline: ReelShort with about 29 percent outside China, followed by DramaBox at 21 percent, DramaWave at 13 percent and GoodShort at 6 percent, roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.

Where the Timeline Points Next

A few patterns emerge when the milestones are set end to end. 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. 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 over year. DramaBox and ReelShort each took in about $140 million in that quarter, so competition at the top has grown closer as well. Monetization has taken on a familiar shape. As of September 2026, a weekly VIP pass costs about $19.99 in the US App Store for apps such as 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 generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI, so production is the area most likely to change next. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output win the next phase, the product remains the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.