iWorld
Rural India propels India’s digital revolution: Kantar’s ICUBE report
MUMBAI: Kantar, the world’s leading data, insights and consulting company, released its ICUBET 2019 report on digital adoption and usage trends in India. The annual tracking study; considered to be the currency for digital adoption in the country, gauges the changing digital ecosystem in India, measuring Internet usage by demographic, activity and device segments.
Key findings:
· Estimated at 574 million, the number of monthly active Internet users has registered an annual growth of 24 per cent indicating an overall penetration of 41 per cent.
· The report projects 11 per cent growth for 2020; estimates 639 million monthly active Internet users
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Active Internet User |
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·2019 |
·574 Million |
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·2020 (estimated) |
·639 Million |
· All monthly active Internet users use a mobile phone as one of the devices to access the Internet
Entertainment moves online
As per the ICUBETM 2019 report, about 84 per cent users access the Internet for entertainment purposes. 2019 witnessed a surge in OTT, both audio and video, probably driven by original contents and cricket (both IPL and Cricket world cup streamed on OTT Platforms). Convenience of content availability across devices and on the go low cost Internet service resulted in a significant growth in the entertainment consumption in the last year. This is expected to continue in 2020 too, especially in view of the lockdown.
More children on the Internet than ever before
At 38 per cent, school going children segment in the age group of 15 years or below has shown a promising growth on the internet usage. Access to information and education, social media, gaming and entertainment, especially, Sports, are driving the adoption.
Content availability drives the surge in daily usage
Content is the king and is driving the surge in daily internet usage. ICUBETM 2019 reports a growth of more than 60 per cent in the daily Internet users in the last one year; almost 9 out of 10 active internet users were accessing the internet daily owing to entertainment and communication needs.
Rural masses continue to propel India’s digital revolution
India’s digital revolution continues to be propelled by the rural masses — Rural India registered a 45 per cent growth in the monthly active internet users in 2019. It is now estimated that there are 264 million internet users in rural India, and this is expected to reach 304 million in 2020. Local language and video are the underlying factors for the internet boom in rural. The rural population has finally crossed the point of a chasm by embracing the Internet in a big way, resulting in a 2.5X growth in penetration in the last 4 years.
Looking ahead:
· Children and housewives will be the new Internet adopters in the next year or two. Most of these users already have Internet at home, and it will be more about breaking the mindset barriers to access the web. With the availability of curated content for these groups, the adoption will be considerably faster amongst these segments.
· Video, Voice and Vernacular (3 Vs) will be significant usage factors for the Internet users. These will drive higher engagement and frequency of usage, thereby, helping the users mature in their Internet journey.
· IOT and Smart Devices will make the internet as much a household phenomenon as it is an individual phenomenon.
Puneet Avasthi, senior director, Insights Division, Kantar, said: “The latest edition of Kantar ICUBE 2019 report shows that the digital base in India has achieved a strong growth with the addition of over 112 million users last year. The new decade is expected to witness the next wave of Digital India aided by the recent COVID-19 pandemic that has catalysed the speed at which the already connected consumer is getting further connected with devices, payments, e-medicine, etc. Kantar’s ICUBETM 2019 report gives a front-line view of the digital adoption and its growth drivers, thereby providing marketers the key insights necessary for formulating their marketing and communication strategies.”
“The lockdown and social distancing have pushed users experiment with various digital solutions, some of them by desire while others due to compulsion. The comfort of accessing services and availing their benefits from the comfort of home in the times of social distancing will continue to push users to adopt and use multiple Internet services. Given this, the year 2020 is likely to see a tectonic shift in both Internet adoption and frequency of usage. OTT, Hyperlocal services, Social media and communication and Online Payments will be some key elements that will drive the impact,” said Biswapriya Bhattacharjee, Vice President, Insights Division, Kantar.
(Internet User is defined as anyone who has accessed the internet in the past one month)
ICUBE is an annual syndicated study of Kantar to measure the reach and frequency of Internet usership in India. Launched in 1998, the study is in its 22nd year. ICUBE 2019 covered about 75,000 respondents across 390 cities and urban locations and about 1300+ villages. The study represents all states and Union Territories of India barring Lakshadweep. The data collection for the study was conducted between May to August 2019.
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.
