iWorld
Loco becomes global ‘Next Hottest Products’: report
Mumbai: Loco was named one of the “Next Hottest Products” by global product analytics company Amplitude in its Product Report 2022.
Products and businesses that have made the digital customer experience a key component of their business strategy are recognised on the list of the “Next Hottest Products.” According to data sent to Amplitude, these products have experienced at least a 40 per cent year-over-year growth in monthly active users despite the current economic climate.
Between 21 June and 22 June, Loco’s DAUs increased by 900 per cent , and live watch hours increased by 19x during this same period. This year’s “Next Hottest Products” list, which was expanded from last year’s original list, honours 30 rapidly expanding digital products from businesses in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
Commenting on the announcement Loco founder Anirudh Pandita, said, “We are delighted that Loco has made Amplitude’s “Next Hottest Product” List. As the global leader in product analytics, Amplitude, has great insight into the products that are growing the fastest across the globe. To be named to the Top 30 list globally underlines the tremendous growth we have witnessed at Loco over the last year. Product-led growth is the foundation for growing in any economic condition, but more so in the volatile economic environment that currently exists globally. At Loco, we have one of the best product and technology teams in the country, and this honour is a recognition of each individual who works in those teams. We put users at the centre of all our product efforts, and the organisation continues to deliver features at breakneck velocity! Our product efforts, coupled with our pioneering efforts in building the gaming community in India, have enabled us to become the leading independent game streaming platform globally.”
Dedicated to democratising gaming entertainment, Loco is an esports and live streaming platform. The platform has been a pioneer in the live game streaming and esports sectors in India, paving the way for gaming to go from a niche hobby to a mainstream national interest. Loco has maintained its position as the industry’s leading innovator by establishing India’s first NFT esports platform and growing to be the nation’s top sponsor of esports competitions. Additionally, Loco has seen a remarkable 511 per cent growth in MAUs over the past year.
The “Next Hottest Products” are chosen from monthly user data sent to the Amplitude platform over a 13-month period, from June 2021 to June 2022, that has been aggregated and anonymized. Products had to have a minimum of 10,000 monthly active users at the beginning of the analysis period to qualify for this year’s list. Every company included had to be privately held by June 2021.
Amplitude chief product officer Justin Bauer said, “Today every company leader is thinking about how to grow in an efficient and sustainable way. Your digital product is the answer. The companies recognised in this year’s Product Report have shown tremendous, lasting growth despite turbulent economic conditions. Product-led growth is a core part of many of their strategies, and for good reason. Product-led organisations can create experiences users love, acquire new customers at lower costs, and use data to ensure they’re making the right product investments. I am expecting big things from the companies on this list.”
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.
