About GoodShort

GoodShort

GoodShort is a vertical micro-drama streaming app for overseas markets, part of the wave of Chinese-built short-drama — duanju — platforms that export one-to-two-minute serialised episodes to phone audiences outside China. The app is sold in the app stores by Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. Caixin's reporting on China's short-drama exporters names Beijing New Reading Technology as the company behind GoodShort and lists it among the top-earning Chinese micro-drama platforms abroad, while ownership guides based on company databases place it in the New Reading Era (Xin Yue Shi Dai) / GoodNovel group in Beijing, adapting that group's web-novel intellectual property into short dramas of about a minute per episode. Trade profiles of its studio operation report that GoodShort generated approximately US$220 million in revenue in 2025 and rose to become the third-largest vertical-drama platform globally, and Media Partners Asia's 2026 market league table gave it about a 6 percent share of the outside-China micro-drama market, behind ReelShort, DramaBox, DramaWave and NetShort. Its App Store listing carried a 4.9-star average from roughly 532,000 ratings in an October 2026 snapshot.

The duanju format GoodShort sells

GoodShort's product is the micro-drama format that Chinese platforms industrialised at home before exporting it: vertical video shot for a phone screen, episodes of roughly a minute, seasons built from dozens of short instalments, and plots engineered around cliffhangers — billionaire romances, secret heirs, revenge arcs, werewolf and supernatural love stories, family secrets and sudden reversals. Industry reporting on the category notes that a season can be filmed in about two weeks with lean budgets and small casts, and that stories are often written toward the paywall, with the first stretch of episodes free and the plot hitting a cliffhanger at the point where payment is requested. Omdia estimated that global micro-drama revenues reached US$11 billion in 2025, nearly double the revenues of the entire global FAST channel ecosystem, which makes GoodShort a mid-sized but significant player in one of the fastest-growing categories in screen entertainment.

From web novels to vertical drama

GoodShort's corporate roots explain its catalogue. The New Reading group behind it built its business on web novels — the GoodNovel reading platform is its best-known sibling product — and web fiction is the natural source library for micro-drama: stories already tested on millions of readers, structured in short chapters with constant hooks, and owned within the group. Ownership guides drawing on the ITjuzi and kchuhai company databases place GoodShort in that New Reading Era / GoodNovel group in Beijing, with the consumer app fronted offshore by Singapore New Reading Technology, a structure it shares with most Chinese short-drama exporters, which typically sell through Singapore, Hong Kong or United States entities while production and intellectual property remain anchored in China. Its very name signals the model: "Good" from the group's reading brand, "Short" for the format it adapted that library into.

English-language production and the Los Angeles studio

Trade profiles published in LA Weekly and Programming Insider in 2026 describe how GoodShort moved beyond dubbing or subtitling Chinese originals into commissioning English-language production at scale. The platform began scaling English-language production in 2023, and the profiles report a Los Angeles-based head of studio and executive producer, Hao Chen, overseeing an English-language production slate of more than 100 to 110 vertical series a year, produced across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Turkey and Ukraine. That localised-production strategy — reshooting stories with local casts and cultural edits rather than simply translating them — is the approach industry analysts credit for the leading Chinese apps' success in North America, and GoodShort's version of it mirrors its larger rivals: Sensor Tower-derived market guides describe GoodShort's audience profile as closely resembling ReelShort's, romance-led and female-dominant with premium willingness to pay, and North American-skewed, with the United States and Canada accounting for over 66 percent of its revenue in one 2026 market guide's estimate.

Revenue and market position

Several independent market measurements chart GoodShort's rise. Trade profiles of its studio operation report approximately US$220 million in revenue in 2025 and place it as the third-largest vertical-drama platform globally. Sensor Tower's State of Short Drama Apps 2025 ranked GoodShort third among short-drama apps by in-app revenue in the first quarter of 2025, in a quarter when ReelShort, DramaBox, GoodShort and DramaWave together pulled in nearly US$700 million in in-app purchases, a 300 percent increase on the same period a year earlier, with 370 million downloads across the category. A 2026 market guide estimated GoodShort's monthly revenue at about US$17.3 million in July 2025, fourth in the market, while Media Partners Asia's fuller 2026 league table of the outside-China market — a market it sized at about US$3.6 billion for the year — gave GoodShort roughly a 6 percent share, behind ReelShort, DramaBox, DramaWave and NetShort. In Latin America, Dataxis estimated GoodShort as the leading micro-drama platform in 2026 with 28.3 percent of the combined revenue of the six leading platforms in that region. The estimates differ by methodology — in-app purchase tracking excludes advertising and web-store billing — but they agree on the ranking: GoodShort sits in the leading group, behind the two giants ReelShort and DramaBox.

How GoodShort makes money

GoodShort monetises in the standard way for the category. Viewers spend virtual coins to unlock individual episodes, frequent viewers can buy recurring VIP memberships, and rewarded advertising offers non-paying viewers a slower route through episodes. Analysts of the micro-drama business note that across the leading platforms in-app purchases — virtual coins, episode unlocking and recurring consumption — account for roughly eight of every ten dollars of revenue, with subscriptions and advertising making up the remainder, and that social advertising, above all on Meta's platforms, is the primary user-acquisition channel for all of these apps. The App Store footprint matches that model at scale: a 4.9-star average across roughly 532,000 ratings in October 2026 indicates a mass-market installed base well beyond the niche the format began with.

Regional strength in Latin America

GoodShort's geography is broader than its North American centre of gravity. Dataxis, the market research firm, estimated that micro-drama revenue from the leading platforms in Latin America would reach US$259 million in 2026, and that GoodShort led that regional market with 28.3 percent of the combined revenue of the six leading platforms — ReelShort, DramaBox, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and NetShort — which together account for most of the segment's revenue in the region. Brazil and Mexico together accounted for almost 60 percent of traffic across the six apps, up from less than 40 percent a year earlier, and Dataxis counted 37 micro-drama apps operating in Latin America in 2025, several of which reached the stores, monetised through virtual coins and disappeared within months. GoodShort's regional lead there, set against its top-three or top-four global revenue rankings, shows a platform whose strength is distributed across the Americas as a whole rather than concentrated in a single country.

Competition and the shape of the market

GoodShort competes in a market that Chinese companies dominate: DataEye estimated that Chinese-origin apps took 93 percent of overseas micro-drama in-app purchase revenue in the first half of 2026. Market analyses divide the field into tiers — ReelShort and DramaBox in the first, GoodShort among the fast-rising challengers in the second — and describe apps like GoodShort and NetShort as natural second-window platforms for producers whose catalogues suit the romance-led, North American audience. The category's economics are consolidating around a handful of scaled players even as dozens of smaller apps launch and, in regions such as Latin America, sometimes disappear within months; Dataxis counted 37 micro-drama apps operating in Latin America alone in 2025. GoodShort's combination of an owned web-novel library, a Los Angeles-centred English production slate and top-tier revenue places it among the small group of platforms the market's league tables consistently track, rather than among the transient entrants.

GoodShort in the China round of this directory

GoodShort is profiled in the television and streaming section of this China round because, despite its Singapore storefront and Los Angeles studio, the company behind it is a Beijing group, identified by Caixin as Beijing New Reading Technology, exporting a format invented and industrialised in China. It exemplifies the newest chapter of Chinese screen media abroad: not a broadcaster or a channel, but an app — built on Chinese web fiction, shot in vertical video on several continents, and sold episode by episode to a global, predominantly female, romance-drama audience that traditional television never organised. Its reported US$220 million in 2025 revenue and third-place global ranking make it, alongside ReelShort and DramaBox, one of the defining Chinese media exports of the micro-drama era.