iWorld
Worldwide Media gets going with Grazia Intern Diaries
MUMBAI: For sometime now, publisher Worldwide Media has been churning out video content which has been making its way on television or on the web. Among the shows it has executed figure: The Good Homes show (in association with channel TLC and Hafele), Famously Filmfare (Colors Infinity), Nexa Journeys on AH1 (Discovery) and Secret Ingredients (for Michelin Tyres).
And the latest to come out of its content studio (headed by Vidyut Patra) is the scripted reality web series Intern Diaries – an eight part show. As the title suggests, it is all about the experiences of two young girls as they intern – where else but at Worldwide Media fashion title Grazia. The first two episodes were released digitally on 15 May and with two being released every week, since then. The last of the two episodes are slated to go out next week.
“Given the current consumption pattern on digital, video content draws the maximum eyeballs and hence when it came to expanding Grazia’s audience base on digital, we thought of creating an original web series that would resonate its brand tonality – being young, easy chic, uber-cool and high street. Grazia , being a fashion and beauty brand catering to a younger audience and having interns working with the team round the year, the idea of Intern Diaries was formed,” Worldwide Media (Grazia’s parent) business strategy and special projects head Sunil Wuthoo explains, giving the backdrop to the series.
To Worldwide Media’s advantage, Lever brand Ponds BB+ latched on to the idea and agreed to associate with it. The reason: a similar target group of young female audience mainly into the world of fashion and glamour.
The show features two girls – Tara and Anika, who are interning at Grazia and are aspiring to make a mark in the world of high fashion, style and Bollywood. And according to the Grazia website, the interns are seen working their way through tasks, completing them to the magazine’s standard. The web series takes “the audience through a journey of real situations, fashion emergencies and challenges from a millennial’s point-of-view and is relatable.”
Because it was shot in the Grazia offices, it features its editor Meharnaz Dhondy and members of the magazine’s brand team. To add to the glam quotient, fashion icons such as Manish Malhotra, Anita Dongre, Masaba Gupta, Sonakshi Sinha and Payal Singhal were roped in to interact with the Anika and Tara in scripted situations.
Says Wuthoo: “We have shown them going through the daily grind like planning magazine covers or some or the other challenges like visiting a designer store to source clothes for a model shoot. And that’s where they get to interact with the star or the designers.”
Line production was assigned to Bodhi Tree Multimedia. “The team was kept small to about 10-12 members so as not to disrupt the actual day-to-day functioning of the magazine and most of the shoot was done in all real locations across Mumbai,” reveals Bodhi Tree Multimedia co-founder Mautik Tolia.
Promotion was in three phases – pre-teaser, teaser and promo. While the teaser phase was used to boost the excitement, pre-teaser phase saw celebrities talking about their own internship experience. Those videos were posted on Grazia’s social media pages as well as on the featured celebrities’ social media pages.
This was further followed by the launch of the microsite that acted as a hub for this show, which not only hosted the episodes, but also a lot of ancillary content around the show including details about the characters and their fictional lives.
“We also sustained the interest of the viewers by connecting them with the characters through Facebook live sessions and publishing key moments from the show on various platforms. All of this is also being cross promoted across various social assets belonging to brands like Filmfare, Femina, TopGear, Hello! India, which further helped reach out to a young demographic,” says Wuthoo.
At the time of writing, Intern Diaries had manage to generate close to 10 million impressions, 2.5 million views, with a reach of 8 million.
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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.
