iWorld
Mobile internet revenues in India growing at 40 per cent annually: Study
MUMBAI: Mobile internet revenues in India are growing at a whopping 40 per cent a year as compared to countries like China and Brazil, where the growth is pegged at 25 per cent annually.
Even in most mature mobile markets, such as Japan and South Korea, mobile Internet revenues are growing at 10 per cent a year, much faster than overall GDP.
In 13 countries that represent about 70 per cent of global GDP, the mobile Internet is already generating some $700 billion in revenues annually, the equivalent of $780 per adult, and has created employment for about three million people. Mobile Internet revenues will have grown to $1.55 trillion across these countries by 2017, an annual increase of 23 per cent.
The 13 countries surveyed are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The single largest contributor to mobile Internet revenue growth in the next several years will be the apps, content, and services component of the ecosystem, driven by the rapid expansion of mobile shopping and advertising.
Revenues are growing especially quickly in developing markets, according to a report released today by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), The Growth of the Global Mobile Internet Economy, fueled by competition among the various mobile Internet ecosystems. The resulting innovation and choice are leading to better devices and falling prices for consumers.
The new BCG report, which was commissioned by Google, examines the economic impact of the digital economy related mobile devices (such as smartphones, tablets, and wearables) and excludes economic activity generated by the broader mobile technology industry, such as revenues generated by phone calls, SMS “texting,” the manufacturing of non-Internet-enabled devices (feature phones, for example), and capital expenditures for non-digital data activities on mobile networks.
Consumers are by far the biggest beneficiaries of the mobile Internet. On a per capita basis in the 13-country sample, the average consumer surplus — the perceived value that consumers themselves believe they receive over and above what they pay for devices, applications, services, and access — is about $4,000 a year, or seven times what consumers pay for devices and access. The mobile Internet’s consumer surplus across the 13 countries is approximately $3.5 trillion a year. The largest aggregate consumer surplus is in the US ($827 billion), followed by China ($680 billion). On a per capita basis, consumers in Japan, Germany, France, and Australia all enjoy mobile Internet surpluses of more than $6,000 per year.
“Competition throughout the mobile Internet ecosystem is driving innovation, growth, jobs, and a continually improving experience for consumers and businesses. Increasing mobile access everywhere is leading to new uses of the Internet — in fields from banking to education and from health care to the delivery of public services — further propelling growth. Policy makers can help keep the mobile Internet economy moving by pursuing proven policy goals that encourage continued improvement in these areas, as well as innovation, value creation, and consumer welfare and choice,” said BCG partner and coauthor of the report Dominic Field.
Competition occurs at every layer of the mobile ecosystem — among service providers, enablement platforms, and companies providing apps, content, and services. Competition is particularly intense — and evolution especially fast paced — among device manufacturers and operating system companies. As recently as 2010, the BlackBerry and Symbian platforms accounted for more than half of all smartphone sales in the 13-country sample; they now represent less than five per cent. Today, Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android OS, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS are fighting for market share while keeping an eye on newer entrants, such as Amazon’s Fire OS, Nokia’s X platform, Xiaomi MIUI, Firefox OS, and Tizen, which are further augmenting user choice and competition. All of this leads to faster innovation, more capable devices, and lower prices.
A big part of the mobile Internet success story is the flourishing app economy. There have been more than 200 billion cumulative downloads from the various app stores since the first app was developed in 2008. More than 100 billion downloads took place in 2013 alone. Leading app-store operators paid developers more than $15 billion between June 2013 and July 2014.
“The growth of the mobile Internet economy is propelled by increasing affordability and accessibility, as well as by advances in technology and infrastructure. The rapid advent of more affordable phones — those costing $100 or less — will drive both greater penetration and new uses,” said BCG partner and coauthor of the report Paul Zwillenberg.
Zwillenberg also noted that while only about 20 per cent of smartphone shipments in 2013 comprised devices priced below $100, a fast-growing array of global, local, and new-entrant manufacturers are now making affordable smartphones.
Large majorities of consumers in the 13-country sample would forgo most offline media (the one exception is TV) before losing their mobile Internet access. Two-thirds or more would give up chocolate and alcohol. More than half are willing to forgo coffee and movies. A third are willing to give up their cars, and more than a quarter would abstain from sex.
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.
