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2014 – The Year of the Mobile
2014 was a new era in the rise of mobile, content marketing and big data for many businesses. Right in its embryonic stage, mobile has irrevocably transformed digital marketing. It’s been an eventful year for marketers with the rise of omni-channel, mobile-first marketing, and a rapid growth in geo-tagging management – to name, but a few. The digital marketing industry will evolve even further in 2015, bringing a new set of marketing strategies and opportunities to look forward to. Here are some recent trends marketers should be attentive to for the year ahead.
We have already heard a lot about the mobile craze everywhere but 2014 bucked that trend. We are now going to witness major consumer transactions happening via mobile driven by mobile payment options such as paytm and freecharge. There is a perfect atmosphere of strong consumer evolution to mobility for every aspect of their lives, as well as enterprises treating mobility as a strategic advantage. We also saw mobile usage of social media overtake desktop usage. The mobile-centric Instagram, grew to over 300 million active users. There are more mobile phones (7.2 billion) on planet than number of people (7.16 billion).
It happens very rarely that a prediction in digital industry comes true. There were a lot of talks about 2014 being a year of mobile and that statement has come true, with 2014 witnessing an enormous growth in smartphones and so will 2015. Mobile presents a huge opportunity for marketers to reach their target audiences. Google research shows that 7 per cent of mobile searches led to a purchase within 24 hours, rising to 18 per cent for local searches. Smartphones are also changing communication habits – particularly for younger generations – with 94 per cent of communication time for 12 to 15 year olds spent on text-based activities such as instant messaging and social media, and only 3 per cent spent on voice calls.
In 2015, we will see the widely discussed mobile-first marketing approach finally develop to take advantage of these high consumption levels. Retailers will push more high-volume, low-cost products through their mobile commerce platform, to gain enhanced data on consumer behaviour, locality, adaptation, and ROI.
In the 2014 elections, we saw most politicians using social media for campaigning. Not only Indian politicians used social media but during the presidential elections in 2008 and 2012 president Barack Obama’s team most effectively used social media campaigns. In India, we saw the Modi selfie on voting day, live rally broadcasts on mobiles, AAP using it for driving new member joinees and for getting citizen participation in its initiatives.
Global revenue from app stores is expected to rise 62 per cent this year to $25 billion. From ecommerce companies to travel outfits to government departments, everyone is launching mobile apps and driving significant sales and user engagement through same such as paytm, free charge and other mobile centric means for micro small payments. It’s almost like a DoTcom evolution of 15 years ago – no one wants to miss the bus. The same followed by a rise in the mobile handsets sales, led by newer and fancier smartphones is a major catalyst in making 2014 an era of the mobile and paving way for the coming year. India is already the 3rd largest market for smartphones and will overtake USA shortly.
Telecom operators have finally started to see a lot of data usage from their customers and their 3G infrastructure investments have started to show financial results. Consumers are in a happy mode with lot of choices – lot of people have more than one handset and kids and teenagers are not the only one using them for social media.
India has emerged as the strongest market for digital companies who see a huge growth opportunity here. For Facebook, Whatsapp, Google – India is one of their top markets. Regardless of where an Internet company is launched today, India very quickly becomes a large user base for it.
Rural India is also not untouched from this craze and has started seeing relevant information and entertainment services readily available to them via mobile. Venture capitalists and investors are willing to bet long term on sustainability of mobile led digital evolution and are pumping in millions of dollars.
So what does all this mean as a marketer?
1- Jump on mobile bandwagon quickly, else you will lag behind
2- Gear Up for Big Data & analytics to play a bigger role in next phase of mobile evolution
3- Gut based decisions will start getting replaced by more number driven decisions
4- 3Ms need to be central to your marketing plans –i.e., Millions of people engaging with Multiple offerings on their Mobile devices.
Mobile has started to impact almost every sector of our life – payments, healthcare, shopping, eating, travel, investments, and education etc. and it is important for marketers to understand the changing trends and design their marketing strategies accordingly. Mobiles provide a personal connect to user base and customers which helps impactful brand engagement with the audiences, which is all a brand campaign is about. It’s an era of dialogue creation, with integrated campaigns across platforms made even more convenient via mobile. 2015 promises to ride this wave of momentum as smartphones will become more secure, more contextual, more location-aware, more targeted, and more integrated. We will witness the most engaging mobile experiences till date come to life in 2015. There will be an integration of Mobility, the cloud, and the Internet of Things creating significant opportunities for businesses to expand and for consumers to enjoy. But these opportunities will also come with newer challenges.
(These are purely personal views of Digital Quotient chief operating officer Vinish Kathuria and indiantelevision.com does not necessarily subscribe to these views.)
MUMBAI: 2025 will be remembered as the year India’s OTT industry stopped chasing scale for its own sake and began reckoning with how audiences actually consume content. Completion rates fell, patience wore thin and the limits of long-form excess became impossible to ignore. In this guest column, Pratap Jain, founder and CEO of ChanaJor, traces how micro-drama moved from the fringes to the centre of viewing behaviour, why short-form fiction emerged as a retention engine rather than a trend, and how platforms that respected time, habit and emotional payoff were the ones that truly grew up in 2025.
If there is one thing 2025 will be remembered for in the Indian OTT industry, it’s this: the industry finally stopped pretending.
Stopped pretending that bigger automatically meant better.
Stopped pretending that viewers had endless time.
Stopped pretending that scale without retention was success.
What began as a quiet reset in 2023 and a cautious correction in 2024 turned into a very visible shift in 2025. Business models matured. Content strategies tightened. And most importantly, platforms started aligning themselves with how Indians actually watch content, not how the industry wished they would.
At the centre of this shift was micro-drama—not as a trend, but as a behavioural inevitability.
When OTT finally understood the time problem
For years, long episodes were treated as a marker of seriousness. A 45–60 minute runtime was almost a badge of credibility. Shorter formats were pushed to the margins, labelled as “snack content” or “mobile-only.”
That belief quietly collapsed in 2025.
What platform data showed very clearly was not a drop in interest—but a drop in patience. Viewers weren’t rejecting stories. They were rejecting commitment.
Across platforms, the same patterns appeared:
* First-episode drop-offs on long-form shows kept increasing
* Completion rates continued to slide
* Viewers were sampling more titles but finishing fewer
At the same time, shows with episodes in the six to 10 minute range started showing the opposite behaviour: higher completion, higher repeat viewing, and stronger daily habit formation.
Micro-drama didn’t win because it was short. It won because it respected time.
Micro-Drama didn’t arrive loudly. It took over quietly.
There was no single moment when micro-drama “launched” in India. It crept in through dashboards and retention charts.
By mid-2025, it was clear that viewers were happy watching four, five, sometimes six short episodes in one sitting—even when they wouldn’t finish a single long episode. Romance, relationship drama, slice-of-life conflict, and grounded comedy worked especially well.
This wasn’t disposable content. It was compressed storytelling.
In shorter formats, there was no room for indulgence. Every episode had to move the story forward. Weak writing was punished faster. Strong writing was rewarded immediately.
Micro-drama raised the bar instead of lowering it.
Where ChanaJor naturally fit into this shift
ChanaJor didn’t pivot to micro-drama in 2025 because the market demanded it. In many ways, the platform was already built around the same viewing behaviour.
From the beginning, ChanaJor focused on short-to-mid-length fictional stories that felt close to everyday Indian life—hostels, rented flats, office romances, small-town relationships, young people figuring things out. Stories that didn’t need heavy context or cinematic scale to connect.
What worked in ChanaJor’s favour in 2025 was clarity:
* A clearly defined audience
* Tight episode lengths
* Storytelling that prioritised emotion and pace over spectacle
While several platforms rushed to copy global micro-drama formats, ChanaJor stayed rooted in familiar Indian settings and conflicts. That familiarity mattered. Viewers didn’t have to “enter” the world of the show—it already felt like theirs.
Why audiences started responding differently
One of the biggest misconceptions going into 2025 was that audiences wanted shorter content because their attention spans had reduced. That wasn’t entirely true.
What viewers actually wanted was meaningful payoff per minute.
On platforms like ChanaJor, episodes didn’t waste time setting the mood for ten minutes. Conflicts arrived early. Characters were recognisable within moments. Emotional hooks landed fast.
A typical consumption pattern looked like real life:
* One episode during a break
* Two more before sleeping
* A few the next day
This is how viewing habits are built—not through marketing spends, but through comfort and consistency.
Viewers came back not because every show was a blockbuster, but because they knew what kind of experience to expect.
2025 was also the year OTT faced business reality
The other big change in 2025 was on the business side. Subscriber growth slowed. Discounts stopped hiding churn. Customer acquisition costs rose.
Platforms were forced to ask harder questions:
* Are viewers finishing what they start?
* Are they returning without reminders?
* Is this content worth what we’re spending on it?
This is where micro-drama began outperforming expectations. A well-written short series could deliver sustained engagement without massive budgets. It didn’t peak for one weekend and disappear—it stayed alive through repeat viewing.
Platforms like ChanaJor benefited because they weren’t chasing inflated launch numbers. The focus was on consistency and retention, not noise.
Failures Became Visible Faster
2025 also exposed weaknesses brutally.
Several platforms assumed micro-drama was a shortcut—short episodes, quick shoots, instant traction. What they discovered was that bad writing fails faster in short formats than in long ones.
Viewers dropped off within minutes. Episodes were abandoned mid-way. Weak stories had nowhere to hide.
Micro-drama didn’t forgive laziness. It amplified it.
The platforms that survived were the ones that treated short storytelling with the same seriousness as long-form—sometimes more.
OTT Stopped Chasing Prestige and Started Chasing Habit
Perhaps the most important shift in 2025 wasn’t technical or creative—it was psychological.
OTT stopped trying to look like cinema. It stopped chasing validation through scale and awards alone. It began behaving like what it actually is in people’s lives: a daily companion.
Platforms like ChanaJor found their space here because that mindset was already baked in. The goal wasn’t to dominate a weekend launch. It was to quietly become part of someone’s everyday viewing routine.
That shift changed everything—from release strategies to how success was measured.
What 2025 Ultimately Taught the Industry
By the end of the year, three truths were impossible to ignore:
* Time is the most valuable thing a viewer gives you
* Retention matters more than reach
* Format must follow behaviour, not ego
Micro-drama didn’t take over because it was fashionable. It took over because it fit real life.
Looking Ahead
Micro-drama is not replacing long-form storytelling. It is redefining the baseline of engagement.
Longer shows will survive—but only when they earn their length. Short-form fiction will continue to evolve, becoming sharper, more emotionally confident, and better written.
Platforms like ChanaJor have shown that it’s possible to grow without shouting—by understanding the audience, respecting their time, and telling stories that feel real.
2025 wasn’t the year OTT became smaller. It was the year it became smarter.
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.
