ReelShort vs DramaBox: revenue, downloads and ownership

ReelShort and DramaBox at a glance

ReelShort and DramaBox both sell coin-priced episodes of vertical drama, and both draw about half or more of their revenue from the United States. They differ in how much of their record is filed. Crazy Maple Studio, ReelShort's operator, has its results disclosed in the filings of the Shenzhen-listed COL Group, which holds 49.24%. DramaBox's parent, Dianzhong, is private, so most DramaBox figures are vendor estimates or company claims.

ReelShort and DramaBox compared

Which makes more money, ReelShort or DramaBox?

Revenue in this category is published on three bases: app-store consumer spend, gross in-app purchase value and company revenue. They are not interchangeable (how to read the leaderboard). The table sets the two apps side by side only where one vendor measured both over the same period on the same measure.

On that basis the two are close. Sensor Tower put ReelShort ahead in Q1 2025 app-store in-app purchases; Naavik, using Sensor Tower data, put DramaBox ahead in Q1 2026 Android in-app purchases outside China. Insightrackr placed DramaBox first by modelled overseas revenue from in-app purchases and advertising for 1 to 28 August 2026, up 28.8% on July (estimate) (Insightrackr August rankings).

Figures that cannot be compared directly:

• ReelShort: COL Group's filings put Crazy Maple Studio's FY2025 revenue at RMB 5.72bn (about $805m), up 97% (official). For January to March 2026 COL disclosed Crazy Maple revenue of RMB 1.57bn (official).
• DramaBox: Sensor Tower estimated FY2025 revenue at about $530m (estimate). A filed company total and a vendor estimate are different measures.
• FY2024: Sensor Tower and Media Partners Asia put ReelShort at about $400m gross; Diandian and Media Partners Asia put DramaBox at about $323m. The vendor pairs and measures differ.
• Combined: Media Partners Asia and ampd put the two apps' annualised revenue together at about $1.5bn in mid-2026 (estimate), at the APOS conference as reported by Variety.

Like-for-like revenue estimates (same vendor, period and measure)

ReelShort vs DramaBox downloads and rankings

Download rankings and revenue rankings diverge. In Sensor Tower's Q1 2026 global tables, published via Adjust, DramaBox ranked first by revenue and fourth by downloads, while ReelShort ranked second on both (app rankings). Neither app led DataEye's H1 2026 overseas download table, which FreeReels topped with more than 218m.

In FY2024, Sensor Tower estimated that DramaBox, ShortMax and ReelShort together took 76% of all category downloads (estimate). DramaBox says it had passed 465m cumulative downloads by June 2026, across 175 territories, 16 languages and more than 6,000 titles (company, unaudited). Full-year download estimates for the two apps come from different vendor combinations, so the table pairs only figures from a single vendor. Wider rankings are in short drama app rankings.

Download and chart positions

Audience, viewing time and subscriptions

Owl & Co., tracking 20 top platforms outside China, found DramaBox with 36% of views among paid apps in Q3 2026 and ReelShort with 29% (estimate), The Hollywood Reporter reported on 20 October 2026. The top title by minutes watched was ReelShort's AI-generated The Great and Powerful Genie (Owl & Co. Q3 report).

Third-party estimates put ReelShort at about 50m to 55m monthly active users, against the company's own claim of more than 70m on 14 July 2026.

On time spent, ReelShort users in the United States averaged 35.7 minutes a day, ahead of Netflix at 24.8 (estimate). Some accounts credit the figure to Adjust and Sensor Tower for 2025, others to Omdia for Q4 2025.

In Dentsu's Entertainment Spotlight 2026 survey of 8,400 consumers in 12 markets, DramaBox, My Drama and ReelShort were the platforms respondents most often subscribed to (Dentsu survey).

Who owns ReelShort and DramaBox?

Crazy Maple Studio is an associate of COL Group, which holds 49.24% with 47.81% of voting rights and keeps ReelShort's revenue out of its consolidated accounts (COL Group half-year results). DramaBox is run from Singapore by StoryMatrix, which press reports describe as owned by Dianzhong, a group that has withdrawn two ChiNext listing applications and remains private. Disney invested an undisclosed amount in DramaBox through its 2025 accelerator cohort; no equity stake or valuation has been disclosed. The full map is in who owns the microdrama apps.

The two groups have clashed in public. In July 2025 Dianzhong, with Tinghuadao and Maiya, accused ReelShort of large-scale plagiarism; eight titles were flagged and three removed. The accusations were public statements rather than a court filing (filings and court records). Separately, a US Video Privacy Protection Act class action against Crazy Maple over a Meta pixel on reelshort.com was voluntarily dismissed on 24 November 2025 (court record).

Recent ReelShort and DramaBox news

• 20 October 2026: ReelShort and Wattpad set two more vertical series from Wattpad stories, after Just One Kiss premiered on ReelShort in September 2026 (C21Media).
• 15 October 2026: Orange Middle East and Africa signed a multi-year agreement with Crazy Maple Studio to offer ReelShort on its Max it TV service in 17 markets, four of them due to launch in 2026 (Ecofin Agency).
• 12 October 2026: WWE and ReelShort set a 23 October premiere for Agent of Shadows, their first title since announcing a partnership on 14 July 2026 (Variety).
• 2 October 2026: DramaBox's head of communications, Marcela Kartaszewicz, said LGBTQ+ stories and age-gap love stories were among the most popular genres and that DramaBox was adding thriller elements to its scripts (The Hollywood Reporter).
• 26 August 2026: Vidio and ReelShort announced ReelShort's first platform partnership in Indonesia, with titles inside Vidio's premium packages from 1 September (Vidio's ReelShort announcement).
• 2 August 2026: Peacock was reported to have licensed a package from ReelShort, a point resting on trade reporting rather than a primary document (trade reports on Peacock and ReelShort).
• June 2026: DramaBox's head of communications described its Latin American method to PRODU as reskinning, adapting proven scripts with local casts. The company says it will make more than 20 locally adapted titles through 2026 and has named 11 (DramaBox reskinning).
• 8 and 9 January 2026: Business Insider reported that DramaBox was seeking up to $100m. No completed round has been confirmed.