iWorld
GUEST ARTICLE: 96% of NFT projects will fail, and why?
Mumbai: The year 2020 was unprecedented in many ways, but what was undeniably phenomenal was the rise of the crypto world, drawing new users to it. However, this dramatic escalation of the crypto world has seen another new market in the digital sphere-the NFTs, which has gathered much attention and somewhat spread like wildfire, which no one can stop. Nowadays, it can be seen that celebrities from around the world are getting into the NFT space and the press is flooded with success stories.
It may seem that investing in NFTs is the quickest way to earn money. But, just like any other thrilling experience, there will definitely be challenges involved. As per various reports, it has been analysed that 95 per cent of investors lose money since they lack proper research and, therefore, they follow short-term projects which have no value. Amidst the crypto crash this year, it appears that the bloodbath in the crypto market has affected NFT sales too. According to a report in The Guardian, NFT sales reached a 12-month low mark in June 2022.
Reasons why most NFT projects will fail
A majority of NFTs (about 96 per cent) will come crashing down hard, not just temporarily, but permanently, because the creators lack experience in implementing their roadmap in the proper way or are unable to cope with emerging issues in order to establish a long-term and sustainable business. Several NFT projects are just a quick way to grab the cash with no real value or utility backing the digital asset. The main issue with the NFT marketplace is poor marketing strategy; the supply presently outweighs demand, as does the lack of actual value and utility backing NFTs, which in turn will affect the sentiment around the project.
While large brands, companies, and innovators start exploring the NFT space and incorporating the technology themselves, they will soon begin to realise what a valuable NFT looks like when compared to all the useless NFTs presently overflowing the markets.
The reality that modern-day NFT creators and investors fail to recognise is that, with the help of NFTs (a digital technological space), one can either build a brand from the ground up or increase the trust, value, and transparency of existing brands. In contrast, NFT creators have created nothing more than just a picture, which has little to no actual value or utility at all. The creators are not even building a brand or developing a strong intellectual property, failing to deliver quality, and even providing nothing to their customers besides the NFT itself. People need to understand that just because someone is an artist doesn’t mean the person will be a successful NFT project person.
In addition to that, these days’ news regarding NFTs that are making headlines are mere stories about people making huge profits by selling and purchasing NFTs. These types of news tend to create the impression that either NFTs are a get-rich-quickly scam or that any NFT can easily make you a million dollar profit, while both are just untrue to a certain degree. It requires a lot of hard work and talent to benefit from the NFT business.
There’s more to understand on NFTs!
Going by the present market scenario, it seems that rug pulls have become the go-to scam of the NFT ecosystem, and as a result, several projects are facing difficulty in gaining the community’s confidence. Moreover, projects are failing due to a poorly organised team with no experts, poor synchronicity, and also a lack of adequate financial planning. Many NFT ventures are unable to maintain an engaged and vibrant community of supporters, which is probably the numero-uno factor behind building a project. Plus, there is a lack of uniqueness when a project is simply a copy of an existing one with the same features, benefits, and processes or if it does not grab the attention of the audience; thus, they are not able to make it to the live market.
Currently, the NFT space is a perfect example of an overhyped market driven by greed. It’s not an easy task to head an NFT project, and in most cases, it is a tough grind to stand out and survive past launch. NFTs are just going to be another way of branding and marketing a business. Although most NFT projects are failing, that doesn’t imply that all of them are worthless. There are still some projects worth your attention, and you can definitely make profits if you understand the logic behind failing projects so that you can act in the opposite way.
Therefore, the next time someone is thinking about purchasing an NFT, the advice is to do the research, don’t spend more money than you can afford to lose, and only purchase NFTs that spark interest. You must have the ability to build a legit business out of social media. All you need is to be extra careful when diving into this unregulated platform.
The author of the article is JorrParivar creator, founder, and operator Digital Pratik.
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.
