iWorld
Facebook updates architecture for India’s next billion coming online
GURGAON: “We (Facebook) are now launching a new architecture so you can see less grey boxes, and more relevant stories quickly, regardless of your network connection. This new architecture of News Feed allows stories to be ranked on the client after being sent from the server. We avoid spinners and grey boxes by
1) requiring stories to have all necessary media available before rendering them in News Feed and
2) being able to optimize the stories in News Feed for each session, so you can see the most relevant stories even if you’re on slow internet connections,” Facebook VP product development Adam Mosseri said at “News Feed and Partnerships- News, Sports & Entertainment Press Roundtable” on 20 October in Gurgaon.
“We deeply care about India as we focus on building for the next billion people coming online,” Mosseri said. “We are committed to learning about how people everywhere use our product, and making sure Facebook works for them. Connecting the next billion people on Facebook means understanding these differences and building better experiences to work on all connections, devices, and regions,” he added. Over the past many months, we’ve continued to focus on efforts to improve News Feed for everyone regardless of device or network connection, Mosseri said.
Quick stats for India
·In India there are 155 million MAU, 77 million DAU, 147 million Mobile MAU and 73 million Mobile DAU (as of Q2 2016)
·Facebook is available in 12 Indian languages (22 official languages in India, and many more dialects)
·As of the end of Q2 2016, daily actives on Facebook in India had grown 22% year over year, compared to a *17% increase in daily actives on Facebook worldwide.
·Not including Likes, more than 50% of the reactions used in India are Love, and more than 30% of Reactions *used in India are Haha
Facebook Media explores how public figures and media organizations are using Facebook in extraordinary ways
With 1.7 billion people globally and more than 150 million people in India using Facebook monthly, Facebook provides an essential audience platform for content creators and we are building fast and immersive media experiences to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. People around the world are using Facebook to connect with news publishers, video creators, celebrities and sports.
The rapid shift to mobile is fundamentally changing the way creators and publishers can reach and engage their audiences and Facebook is innovating on the types of content that publishers can use to tell stories. Across the globe, people are using mobile devices and adopting visual language to communicate. Social TV experience is a new trend given the new age digital audience who consume content on social media platforms. Facebook plays host to a global TV conversation in part because fans enjoy discussing shows with the people who matter most to them. Facebook has also become one of the best places for TV networks and show creators to connect with and build a community of fans.
Networks and studios are now heavily relying on digital marketing pegged heavily on innovative/ engaging content. Globally 100 million hours of video are now watched daily on Facebook. Tools like Facebook Live and Mentions help celebrities express themselves authentically. Celebrities and entertainment publishers are using Facebook in creative ways, creating immersive experiences that draw people in and give them a deeper artistic experience. For example, through Facebook Live, everyone has a production studio with a built-in global audience in their pockets at all times. Similarly, Instant Articles, 360 video and autoplay video are new native surfaces that we are seeing creators and publishers embrace to build their audiences and businesses.
Facebook always wants to learn from its partners, and is committed to building products and business models hand-in-hand that deliver value to people and publishers on Facebook.
– 670 million people are connected to a News Publisher page on Facebook.
– A recent Pew Survey said that more than 40% of American adults find news on Facebook.
– The American Press Institute found that over 88% of millennials get news from Facebook, more than any other social network.
– Facebook is now a widely-read source for news about government andpolitics. According to a recent Pew study, Facebook is the second most popular source where people online get their political news (48%), secondonly to local news outlets (49%).
Entertainment
– 1 billion people are connected to a public figure on Facebook.
– 17 of the top 20 public figures (8 of the top 10) on Facebook are entertainers.
– Today, thousands of public figures across verticals — sports,entertainment, news/media and more — use Facebook to easily connect with their fans and each other.
– With the largest and most diverse community of entertainment fans in the world, Facebook is the best place for the entertainment industry to personalize and scale their campaigns to reach a global audience — from promoting a new movie or show, to releasing a music video or making an awards season push.
Sports
– Facebook brings together the world’s largest community of sports fans.
– 650 million people around the world are connected to at least one sports Page (league, team, athlete, sports media) on Facebook.
– Facebook is where the largest real-time social media audience comes together to talk about sports’ biggest moments.
– 277 million people had 1.5 billion interactions on Facebook about the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games.
– The most-discussed moment in the history of Facebook was a sporting event. FIFA World Cup.
– 350 million people joined the conversation on Facebook, generating 3 billion interactions (posts, comments and likes) related to the
tournament.
– Facebook is also the largest cricket stadium and year after year , wehave found that more and more people are logging on to Facebook to keep abreast of key cricket events
– This year there was exponential increase in match related content that was created exclusively for Facebook
– During IPL 2016, over 30 million people generated 360 million acebook conversations
– 46 million people interacted on Facebook during this year’s ICC World Twenty 20 2016
– During Cricket World Cup 2015, 36 million people have generated 341 million interactions between January 1 and February 28
– On Facebook, fans discover rich and immersive video that brings them closer to the sports, athletes and teams they love.
– Innovations such as Facebook Live and Facebook 360 video give fans unprecedented access to the action, taking them on the field and in the locker room, and inviting them to interact directly with their favorite players.
– Before his final race at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Michael Phelps used Facebook Live to answer questions from fans and confirm his retirement from competitive swimming. With nearly 4 million views, it was the most-viewed live broadcast by an athlete during the games.
– Facebook helps athletes, teams, leagues and media connect with a global audience of sports fans and achieve their business goals.
– By leveraging Facebook Live and Facebook 360 video, partners can deliver complementary programming for the second screen and expand their reach.
– Facebook helps partners achieve their business goals by growing and engaging their fan base; supporting current revenue drivers such as tune-in, subscriptions, sponsorship and ticket and merchandise sales; and providing new revenue streams such as branded content, Instan Articles and ad breaks in live video.
News
– For journalists and publishers, Facebook is a valuable place to engage with their readers.
– We’re building fast and immersive media experiences to make news discovery better for people and publishers — from Instant Articles to Live and 360 video.
– Facebook is a technology company.
– We know that people are coming to Facebook to get their news and we take our role in the media ecosystem seriously.
– We’re working closely with our media partners and listening to their feedback to help them monetize their content and build their businesses.
– We have to make this work for publishers so we can deliver value to bthem and to everyone on Facebook.
– Facebook is an open platform for all ideas.
– We’re not in the business of picking which issues the world should read about. We are in the business of connecting people and ideas.The goal of News Feed is to show people the stories that are most relevant to them.
– We’re committed to being transparent with publishers about the changes we make to News Feed — providing explanations of any ranking changes and sharing more about how we work.
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.
