iWorld
Two-month long Roposo talent hunt concludes, winners announced
Mumbai: Intending to find the country’s next big content creators, Glance Roposo had launched a nationwide talent hunt #MadeonRoposo, which received over 30,000 entries. On 25 June, this two-month-long virtual talent hunt concluded with the announcement of its winners. The show’s judges and mentors – actor Neha Dhupia, choreographer, and director Farah Khan, and casting director Mukesh Chhabra were present at the finale hosted by TV personality Siddarth Kanan.
The show’s five winners – Harshita Grover (Fashion & Lifestyle), Alka Periwal (Health & Fitness), Navin Panchal (Acting & Comedy), Yamini Pandey (Music, Singing, and Dance), and Nalini Sharma (Breakout – Food, DIY) were chosen amongst the 18 finalists across five categories. Each of the final category winners won cash prizes of Rs one lakh along with an opportunity to create content with all three celebrity judges. Along with this, Vishakha Pandey won a special internship with Chhabra at his casting school in Mumbai, and Roshan Mishra received a premium brand SUV car as the prize.
Roposo’s general manager Mansi Jain said, “With #MadeOnRoposo, we provided all aspiring content creators in India a huge platform and opportunity to showcase their unique talent and gain recognition on merit. The response has been overwhelming from across cities and categories, and as we draw the curtains on this show, we are proud to have been a catalyst in enriching India’s content creator landscape.”
Neha Dhupia said, “We truly believe that creativity is best manifested by producing truly original content though nothing much was happening to identify and groom such talents. We are privileged that a well-known and credible talent platform like Glance Roposo came forward to help us with this mission through a pan-India programme like #MadeOnRoposo.
Talking about the diversity of talent on the show, Farah Khan said, “The key takeaway from this massive talent hunt is that to be a great entertainer on a digital platform like Glance Roposo, you don’t need to belong to certain cities, or even from certain fields like singing, dancing, and acting. You can cook, or have an interest in DIY, or fashion. If you have a creative way of expressing yourself, you can capture the imagination of any audience, through any medium.”
Mukesh Chhabra said, “With the meteoric rise in short video consumption across the world, creators now have the opportunity to become household names, purely on the strength of their talent. The Glance Roposo platform and #MadeOnRoposo have gone a long way in giving the top content creators of the future a stage to reach millions.”
The parent company Glance recently acquired full-stack e-commerce platform Shop101 as the company forayed into celebrity and influencer-led LIVE commerce segment.
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.
