iWorld
Around 80% of ZEE5’s revenue is attributed to India: Punit Goenka
KOLKATA: ZEEL is working towards creating a digital dominance in the Indian media and entertainment market. Their plan has been on track as ZEE5 has significantly grown in the last one year.
At the second leg of APOS2020, ZEEL MD & CEO Punit Goenka reported the last quarter’s financial results of ZEE5 for the first time since its launch. He mentioned that 80 per cent of ZEE5’s revenue is currently attributed to India, and the rest comes in from Asia.
Goenka shared that the platform has not seen a lot of revenue coming in from the western world till now as ZEEL’s linear business is pre-dominantly still running there. Goenka thinks this part of the world could offer the next phase of growth for ZEE5.
ZEEL will shut its linear business in the UK and Europe sometime around the end of this year and ZEE5 will carry the content instead. Later, the move will be repeated in the US and other developed markets. Given the Indian diasporas demand for content, it is presumable that ZEE5 will certainly see fair traction in traffic.
However, the plan is not similar in APAC, MEA, and Africa due to different market dynamics. As TV and digital co-exist in these markets yet, ZEEL is not planning complete digital migration immediately. But, Singapore and Hong Kong exceptionally provide an opportunity for such migration although the timing is not decided yet.
“We have to understand ZEE5 will be played out in the Indian context very differently compared to the developed world. In India, we are still a 97 per cent single TV household market. Therefore, the consumption of television still remains prime. What happens in the digital world or on ZEE5 is that we get consumption in individual capacity which is private consumption. We don’t have enough penetration of alternate screens like PCs or laptops that you see around the world which can replace television,” he states.
“In India, the second screen is usually a mobile phone. You can never replace the TV experience on the phone. Therefore, the consumption of ZEE5 while at home will be replacing television for all people who are either not TV consumers or have moved out of television because of the sheer kind of content. I look at ZEE5 or digital content consumption as an incremental consumption of content. It is not TV versus digital,” he further opines.
ZEE5’s advertising revenue has been impacted in the second quarter of the calendar year as well due to the unprecedented situation as it largely depends on television content. But like the linear business, Goenka is confident that ZEE5 will see a resurgence in advertising from the second or third quarter onwards as it comes out of the Covid2019 situation.
“The biggest thing I had said as a part of the agenda last year was to take ZEE5 ahead and build ZEE5. I put a five-year horizon where it could be as much as 30 per cent of the total business of the company. The business of the company is growing at healthy 12-13 per cent on a CAGR over five year period. That would mean, even on today’s context, ZEE5 revenue could potentially go up by 4x or 5x in the next four years,” Goenka puts it as.
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.
