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Under 25 Summit 2024 wraps up with resounding success, enthusiasm and inspiration
Mumbai: The historic Jayamahal Palace in Bangalore witnessed the ninth edition of the much-anticipated Under 25 Summit 2024, further solidifying its status as the world’s leading youth festival. This extraordinary event brought together a diverse assembly of students, creators, performers, and thought leaders, celebrating the limitless potential of the youth.
The first day of the summit, on 9 March, lived up to its stellar reputation with a star-studded lineup of speakers and performers. Renowned personalities such as Vikrant Massey, Siddhant Chaturvedi, Babil Khan, Nikhil Kamath, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Tanmay Bhat, and Kenny Sebastian graced the stage, captivating the audience with their insights and experiences. The day also witnessed stellar musical performances by Brodha V, No Treble, and Shubham Roy.
The second day, on 10 March, continued the excitement with engaging activities, discussions, and memorable performances. Eminent personalities like Saba Azad, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Niharika NM, and Ankush Bahuguna, presided over various talks at the event. The day concluded with an electrifying drone show and a captivating performance by Ritviz.
Collective Artists Network founder and Group CEO Vijay Subramaniam expressed his enthusiasm, stating, “At the Under 25 Summit 2024, the energy was electric. Ideas exchanged, opinions voiced, and electrifying performances showcased the vibrant spirit of today’s youth. With each passing year, the summit grows more impactful, drawing a larger crowd and sparking greater anticipation. This event embodies the active participation, creativity, and enthusiasm of our youth, paving the way for a promising future driven by their energy and ideas.”
Under 25 Universe CEO and co-founder Anto Philip highlighted, “We gave it our all and wore our heart on our sleeves as we built this year’s summit. It was truly homecoming in more ways than one, coming back to Jayamahal Palace felt special and none of this would have been possible without our student crew and the lovely team that worked tirelessly to make sure no one left the festival ground without a smile.”
Under 25 Universe co-founder Shreyans Jain added, “Having witnessed the high level of gusto and engagement among participants fills me with immense pride. This energy is a testament to the passion shared by us as organizers as well as the enthusiastic attendees towards the goals of the summit.”
Actor Vikrant Massey shared, “Kya mahaul hai! The Under 25 Summit is an event like nothing I’ve seen for youth. The fact that it is also put together by students is a heartening testimony to those whose hands the future of the country lies in.”
Actor Babil Khan emphasized, “It is important to understand why Under 25 Summit is important for our youth; it is because as we try to find our way through the burden of excessive information and external validation, our yearning for the expression of our individuality is drastically increasing. Under 25 Summit allows us to step out of those boxes and be involved in an energy that motivates us to create, to innovate, to inspire and to be inspired. To let our guards down and finally FEEL! I am honored to have been a small part of this beautiful and essential venture.”
Hindustan Unilever general manager Kwality Wall’s Maya Ganapathy commented, “This partnership is truly a unique IP and I am thrilled that we have associated with an event that engages with the student community at such a large scale. Cornetto’s connection with the GenZs is deep and rooted in popular trends and culture that define them! The Under25 summit is a truly immersive event for the Gen Zs, conceptualized and curated by the GenZs themselves! That is why its a pleasure for Cornetto to share this stage with them while keeping things cool and OG, just the way they like it!”
With multiple successful editions under its belt, the summit stands as one of India’s most triumphant edutainment IPs, having welcomed over 100,000 students! With top-tier curation, the Summit brings together different fields through inspiring speaker sessions, talent discovery opportunities, enriching workshops, engaging panel discussions, and interactive experience zones, promising a great experience for all attendees.
Sponsored by Cornetto, Gujarat Tourism, Zero1, Mytnra Fwd, Acer, Korean Ramen Noodles, KFC, Coca Cola, Third Wave Coffee, and others, the two-day summit, held on March 9th and 10th, delivered an immersive experience featuring a rich tapestry of activities. This event encapsulates the essence of active participation, creativity, and enthusiasm among the youth, shaping a promising future for tomorrow’s India.
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
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.
