iWorld
Social media platform Khul Ke rolls out its maiden campaign
Mumbai: Social media platform Khul Ke, launched by Loktantra Mediatech, has rolled out its first campaign “Naya Daur – What’s Next, India?” to commemorate India’s glorious run to its 75th Independence Day on 15 August this year.
Khul Ke is a one-of-a-kind platform that has been launched to empower the audience to have more informed and meaningful conversations. It is the only social media platform that allows video, audio, and text-based conversations and gives audiences a 360 experience.
In the past 75 years, India has completely transformed its image through many extraordinary achievements. From a nation that carried parts of a rocket on a bicycle to a nation that sent a satellite to Mars. From a nation of snake charmers to a major IT service exporting country. From a group of princely states to the world’s largest democracy. From a nation suffering from epidemics to a nation that conducted 25 million vaccinations on a single day. India has come a long way. Naya Daur embodies the current phase where India knows how to play the game of diplomacy, mesmerise the global audience with its music, art, and cinema, and has made strides with its technological innovations. The tagline “What’s next, India?” captures the sentiment of a nation hungry for growth, development, and innovations to change the course of humanity.
India is a nation now racing towards 100 years of Independence. While the campaign honours and celebrates its achievements after independence, it also questions what’s in store for the country and the people in the next 25 years. As a part of the campaign, Khul Ke will host various ‘RoundTables’ and discussion forums on India’s politics, sports, cinema, art & culture, science and technology, and business & economy with known experts from the respective fields.
Additionally, as part of the rollout, the company has launched a campaign film in the voice of a renowned actor, singer, and lyricist Piyush Mishra. The animation film traces India’s remarkable achievements since Independence and speaks about hope, as the nation is on the brink of a new dawn. The campaign will be rolled out across social media platforms, theatres, and radio stations.
Speaking about the platform’s first campaign roll out, Loktantra Mediatech director & chief executive officer Piyush Kulshreshtha said, “Khul Ke is a conversations platform. Users can hold conversations freely in audio and video formats on topics of their own interests. As compared to the existing social media platforms, it is our strong belief that conversation will create possibilities and SM platforms of future will be based on conversations”
He further added, “Khul Ke is at the moment in its test-phase. We are testing the platform for performance and security. While doing so, we needed to hold regular conversations, and were exploring a positive agenda. With the 75th Independence Day coming up, our team decided to experiment with the idea of holding conversations around the last 75 years and future 25 years. It gives us an opportunity to experiment with a variety of content, depth of conversation, quality of moderators and panellists, and interests of the audience. Considering we are still in test-phase and nobody knows about the platform, the topics, the moderators, the panellists and the amount of time the audience spends in such conversations tells us that we are in the right direction. We will continue to bring variety & quality of content through interesting moderators and panellists for an audience that likes to get to the depth and make sense of things they like to discuss. We are sure India will like our format and will join the platform soon.”
Khul Ke chief marketing officer Manish Agarvwal shared, “Our campaign ‘Naya Daur – What next, India?’ reaches out to people across age-groups and walks of life who want to either opine or listen to what industry leaders must share. The objective is to celebrate the landmark moments not just on one day in August but to relive past achievements and take time to prepare for the coming years. The campaign has been rolled out across theatre, radio, digital and social media platforms to create awareness about the platform.”
Conversation can lead to endless possibilities, but the existing clutter of social media platforms currently does not encourage or enable users to explore this power. ‘Khul Ke’ harnessed this thought and gave people the opportunity to engage in uninhibited enriching conversations and increase their circle of influence rather than just be mute spectators. Khul Ke is available on both Appstore and playstore and will also be available on the web www.khulke.com.
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.
