eNews
YU announces senior level appointments
MUMBAI: YU, the new age technology brand, and the fully owned subsidiary of Micromax today announced three senior level appointments, strengthening its core team responsible for future expansion and growth. The company has appointed Bharat Singh Malik as the Vice President of Service, Deepak Dahiya as Head of Sales – South and West region and Chandra Kishore as the Head of Sales – North and East region. The move is aimed at building a robust offline sales network and increasing its focus on customer service.
Commenting on the high profile appointments, Mr. Shubhodip Pal, Chief Operating Officer, YU Televentures said “In a very short span, the agility with which we moved, the products that we introduced, the way our users interacted with us and the feedback that we received from the developer community, has been defining and extraordinary. While in the first phase we focused on taking crucial steps towards consumer confidence and brand acceptability, in the second phase we will strengthening our national presence and growth potential to reach newer audience. This core team brings with them a wealth of experience, which is exceedingly valuable at this juncture of our growth story.”
Bharat is a strategic leader and bring with him a wealth of experience in strategizing and managing the service operations for some of the leading brands in the category including Samsung and Nokia. This is Bharat’s second stint with the company, as he led the same function for Micromax, the parent brand of YU. His area of expertise lies in setting up service networks, contact centers, central support warehouses regional support warehouses. Bharat will aggressively chart out a clear cut service and support strategy to help YU enhance its customer service and delight.
Commenting on his appointment Bharat Singh Malik said “It is a great opportunity for me to be working with YU, a young brand which is all set to make it big. I am proud to be a part of an organization that is dedicated to maintaining a reputation built on quality, service, and uncompromising ethics.”
Deepak Dahiya, Head of Sales- South and West said “Micromax has been a brand really close to my heart as I was one of the initial team members of the Micromax family. I went to the US to pursue an alternate career however a call from Rahul and his vision for YU, got me back. I am thrilled to take the brand to the next level and will certainly focus on two of the biggest smartphone regions in India- South and West”
Commenting on his new role Chandra Kishore said “There is immense potential in regions and consumers are adopting technology like never before. In my new role at YU, I look forward to building growth opportunities for the brand.”
Deepak and Chandra are mandated to boost the online sales while driving YU’s physical footprint across the country. With over 9 years of experience, Deepak Dahiya is a maverick who has been breaking new avenues and driving revenue growth by keeping abreast of market trends and competition moves to achieve market-share metrics. Deepak has been associated with the parent brand Micromax since 2007 in different roles. At YU, Deepak will be a key resource to accentuate its successful journey in the West and South India markets. Chandra has great experience in preparing high impact sales strategies and contributing towards enhancing business volumes and growth. He has been with the parent brand Micromax since 2008 and now in his new role he is all set to solely enhance YU’s presence in some of the largest markets in North and Eastern India.
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
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.
