iWorld
The Quint & ManoramaOnline partner with Ideabrew to distribute podcasts
Mumbai: Ideabrew Studios has partnered with The Quint and ManoramaOnline to create, host, and distribute podcasts. As part of this partnership, Ideabrew studios will host, distribute, and monetize over 30 existing shows, including top shows like Urdunama, Qisse Kahaniyan, and The Big Story. Together, they will also work to create rich content through new brand-led shows that appease the listener as well as benefit the brand partner.
The Quint executive editor Shelly Walia said, “The Quint has been a leader among digital news media companies in leveraging the power of sound through its episodic and serialised podcasts. Collaborating with Ideabrew Studios opens exciting prospects for us in terms of not only reaching out to our habitual listeners and finding a new audience – but also getting to know them better.”
She further added, “The data provided by Ideabrew is helping us better measure user numbers, understand user behaviour, and study demography in a more systematic manner. This year, there’s been an uptick in listenership across podcasting channels as the world returns to post-pandemic normalcy – and for The Quint, the tie-up provides a timely opportunity to capitalise on this revival.”
Ideabrew and ManoramaOnline launched a strategic podcast collaboration in early 2022, resulting in significant amplification and reach for their podcasts as well as scale for the business partnership.
ManoramaOnline CEO Mariam Mammen Mathew said, “We are happy to start our relationship with podcast creators and hosting platform IdeaBrew. In a short time, our listeners have responded well to the interesting and rich content in English and Malayalam languages on different podcast platforms. Podcasting is disrupting the traditional radio space, making it an exciting time for the news industry. We are happy about creating rich news content that’s true to our brand and a refreshing cultural and technological change across our newsrooms.”
With 23 popular shows across genres in Malayalam and English, this is already a head start. Mariam added, “This partnership is going to give us a fillip to push out the several projects in our pipeline.”
Ideabrew CEO Aditya Kuber said, “Whether it’s Covid-19 updates, political discord, a new space launch, or the latest celebrity shenanigans, news channels carry 24-hour news, giving you something to constantly ponder or worry over. Through our medium of audio content, Ideabrew aims to disrupt the way the audience receives and responds to daily news. Our podcasts are designed to engage in healthier outlets that allow our audiences the flexibility to choose when they want to consume their news and also provide stimulating formats in the form of in-depth analysis, interviews, or opinions from experts on the subject to make the news informative, wholesome, and entertaining.”
He further added, “We are excited about making steady inroads into the news category by partnering with the best news providers across the country to make audio the preferred medium to receive national, regional, and local news in different languages. Our premier association with the HW News Network has been phenomenal, attracting a new and far younger audience through podcasts, giving the brand a distinctive extension to get their content out.”
Ideabrew Studios’ current partners for whom they create and host audio shows are Sakal News, HW News, and Reason.
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.
