iWorld
YouTube watch time grew 400% y-o-y, 80% on mobile
MUMBAI: With a growing appetite among Indian consumers to watch videos online, YouTube, as per App Annie, has shared that over 180 million Indians are watching YouTube every month on mobile. The video streaming platform at the fourth edition of Brandcast India, further noted that the watch time in India has grown 400 per cent year on year and 80 per cent of watch time in India comes from mobile. From entertainment to education, from news to beauty – Indians are turning to YouTube for every aspect of their lives
Held in Mumbai, the event brought together top advertisers, agencies, and partners from all across the country to discuss and celebrate YouTube – the destination where Indians choose to watch video.
Improved connectivity, affordable data plans and huge variety of content available has led to over 400 million Indians online and 300 smartphone users today. In the mobile video era, viewers can watch what they want, where they want and when they want – and this greater choice for viewers also means greater opportunities for marketers. In today’s media environment, while there is plentiful reach, it’s harder to attract viewers’ attention.
Elaborating on how ‘attentive reach’ has become the new currency for the advertisers, Google India and South-East Asia head of marketing Sapna Chadha, said, “According to a survey we conducted with Majestic Research, using eye-tracking technology we discovered, the first ad in an TV ad break is watched actively by 50 per cent of people while the last one is watched actively by only 13 per cent of viewers. Attention has always been inherent to advertising. But, capturing and keeping attention has never been harder for advertisers.”
Addressing the audience, Chadha asked them to change how they buy and plan media for attentive reach. She also shared that over the years, YouTube captures audience attention by delivering 95 per cent audibility and 93 per cent viewability.
Speaking on how to make advertising more effective online, MOAT CEO Jonah Goodhart added, “Everywhere in the world, consumption patterns are changing, making ‘attentive reach’ the foundation of any digital campaign. Measurability is the key to understand the efficacy of any brand engagement and we are thrilled to be the first company to independently measure viewability on YouTube.”
Maruti Suzuki VP and head of marketing Sanjeev Handa asserted, “When you combine a format like video and you want to reach out to a billion+ Indians, the answer comes naturally and that is YouTube. YouTube allows us to tell the right brand stories to the right audiences helping us capture their attention. Case in point, is the launch of the IGNIS which was done simultaneously through the physical as well as digital medium to engage with the millennials and, the results were astounding. On YouTube, the launch was viewed over 10 million times, and 20 per cent pre-launch bookings came from digital in the first 10 days.” He further added, “For advertisers to leverage digital effectively, one needs to have deep insights into your consumers, look to target their interests and effectively measure the viewability of the ad.”
Sharing his experience of working with brands, Kurt Hugo Schneider who has over 8 million subscribers on YouTube and has collaborated with over 40 global brands said, “Concept integration and not product integration, is key to making a brand video authentic and earning people’s attention. With technological innovation, brands today have the opportunity to interact more closely with their audience and get a feel of their preferences.”
Attended by over 800 marketers, advertisers and creators, YouTube Brandcast 2017 also saw YouTube Leaderboard Awards where top 10 advertisers with the most creative ads were felicitated. The award celebrated the brands that performed best through a combination of popularity and promotion.
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.
