iWorld
Viacom inks global content & ad sales deal with Snapchat
MUMBAI: Viacom has inked a global partnership with Snapchat that capitalises on and extends the expertise of both companies to creatively and authentically speak to millennial and post-millennial audiences.
The wide-ranging deal, anchored in both content production and advertising sales, will bring two high profile channels to Snapchat Discover — a Comedy Central International channel and an MTV Channel in the US, which will complement the already successful Comedy Central and MTV International Discover channels.
The agreement also grants Viacom the right to sell Snapchat’s US owned and operated advertising inventory, allowing Viacom to offer added value to television advertisers who want to add Snapchat’s wildly popular premium video platform to the media mix. In addition, Viacom also has agreed to provide Snapchat with expanded access so Snapchat can produce Live Stories covering more of Viacom’s tent pole events.
“Viacom and Snapchat naturally complement each other in significant ways that make us ideal partners in both content and business development. Snapchat captures young audiences on an intimate and immersive mobile video platform while Viacom is the leader in premium long- and short-form storytelling for these same audiences. Add in Viacom’s custom marketing solutions and commitment to evolve our global mobile strategy and you’ve got a partnership that is great for both companies, for advertisers, and is a real evolution of the marketplace,” said Viacom CFO Wade Davis.
In addition to selling its advertising alongside its own content on Snapchat Discover, Viacom will now also have the right to sell Snapchat’s US owned and operated ad inventory, which includes ads in ongoing Stories such as New York, capturing daily happenings in New York City, and non-partnered holiday Live Stories, such as Valentine’s Day.
Viacom is the only television company to have this arrangement with Snapchat.
“Snapchat provides the best storytelling experience on mobile. Through this partnership with Viacom, we can now offer television advertisers a way to tell their stories across television and mobile in a frictionless way,” said Snapchat chief strategy officer Imran Khan.
On the content side of the deal, Viacom will further invest in the creation of original premium video content specifically for Snapchat Discover. While MTV International and Comedy Central have previously been committed to creating original content on Discover, additional resources will now be put towards the launch of an MTV US Channel and a Comedy Central International channel on the platform.
MTV’s new Snapchat Discover channel will feature a wide range of content created exclusively for the platform and updated daily. At launch on 9 February, this includes MTV News articles and video with design and art direction unique to Snapchat, exclusive celebrity interviews, and more. MTV is also developing additional Snapchat-native content, including brand-new original series and reinvented MTV fan-favorite franchises for the platform.
Comedy Central will launch internationally on Snapchat Discover on 10 February, delivering always funny content to fans globally. The new international channel will serve Snapchat users daily doses of comedy, from curated WTF News articles and exclusive videos with their favourite comedians to upcoming original series set to debut on Snapchat Discover in the coming year. Since its US launch in January 2015, the Comedy Central channel on Snapchat Discover has become a vibrant pipeline for Comedy Central to develop fresh comedic voices and original content. It is one of the most popular brands on the platform.
Another key element of the Viacom/Snapchat partnership will leverage Snapchat’s Live Stories, which are curated collections of user-submitted content covering major events and places around the world. Through the partnership, Snapchat will have unique access to cover Viacom’s one-of-a-kind, tentpole events, such as MTV’s Video Music Awards (VMAs), BET Experience, and MTV’s EMAs.
The deal grew organically out of a dynamic Viacom/Snapchat relationship, including many custom advertising campaigns created by in-house creative agency Viacom Velocity that ran in Snapchat Discover, as well as “break-the-internet” level of fan engagement for Viacom events covered by Snapchat Live Stories and Snapchat Discover channels launched a year ago.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
