eNews
Do ‘set paths’ & sense of duty stop Asians from taking risks?
GOA: The concluding day of the twelfth edition of Goafest presented a knowledge seminar that partially revolved around the East’s resurgence in its potential to (soon) surpass the West as the dominant game-changer in terms of ‘creativity’.
Speaking widely on the topic, AKQA’s executive creative director Eric Cruz highlighted a few factors that could soon play a crucial role in ensuring so.
The ‘ideas and innovation company’ executive cited how one of the superpowers, China, began its quest for excellence through creativity over 4000 years ago. Soon, the nation turned into the Innovation Valley of Asia. He argued that, over the past few decades, the East merely became a consumer or follower of trends, instead of impacting the world through its own creations. From search engines to social media platforms, most inventions have emerged from the West, and Asians have merely been the heavy consumers of these trends.
Cruz emphasised on China’s role throughout its history on spearheading the creativity phenomenon and impacting the world as we see it. Through graphs and statistics, Cruz demonstrated the rapid growth in the need of technological presence in every necessity of life. With the metaphor that the future is much like a tsunami, Cruz identified the early obstacles in understanding this phenomenon. “We are living in a world where creative history is being made. And, the question of the hour is ‘Are we Asians creative enough to invent our own world?’” asked Cruz to the room filled with enthusiasts.
The root problem as identified by him, was the way Asians have evolved. The academic structure, values and cultural environment leads to the loss of creativity, added Cruz, and more often than not, the sense of duties and set paths thrust upon Asians prevent them from exploring the creative field entirely. “The perception globally is that Asia is posed to follow, and not innovate. We are known to be fast followers but not innovators,” stated Cruz.
New world tools like Automation and AI are necessary steps towards evolution. Automation will help humans rid of menial processes and AI will enable to enhance the creative process.
Cruz ended the talk a hopeful note that since 50 per cent of students in the West are Asians, there is a new generation which is learning from the West to implement change and innovation in their respective countries. China, Korea and India will be the centers of innovation in the years to come.
The following speaker was all of 11 years old, but came with an abundance of wisdom and quick-fixes. Youngest Indian TED Speaker Ishita Katyal addressed a pertinent topic of discussion — Encouraging creativity. She started off by asking valid questions, “Why are kids not encouraged to be creative or ask questions? Why are they forced into fixed streams of academics?”
She went on to elaborate, with the help of her personal example, how creativity is ageless. When she wrote her first book at the age of eight, she faced tremendous prejudice from publishers and others, but her determination and support from her parents helped her pursue her dreams and the book was published to roaring success.
One of the biggest obstacles one faces while trying to fulfill their dreams is fear, and this little girl mesmerised the house with a simple story of how you can beat your fear by simply moving closer to it. The more closely you encounter your fear, the smaller it becomes. She ended by saying, “We the children are the future, and if you want us to build a beautiful world, give us the answers to the questions we ask.”
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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.
