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9 incentives that digital start-ups need: IAMAI
MUMBAI: To recognise Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of ‘Digital India,’ the industry body Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) has come up with specific fiscal and non-fiscal measures that India’s Internet scene requires. According to the association, the digital start-up ecosystem in India should be systematically encouraged by focusing on specific fiscal interventions.
The suggestions are as follows:
1) Improve Investment Environment: India’s entrepreneurs need early stage venture capital, which is why the domestic venture capital sector needs to develop further. In the US, the VC industry took off when their government allowed the large pension funds to put 5-10 per cent of their assets into VC firms.
2) Angel Tax: Angel Tax under Sec 56 (2) of the Income Tax Act has not been tailored to restrict start-up funding but it has put start-ups under the the Income Tax scanner, questioning the valuation by domestic individual investors. The criteria to qualify as an angel fund are stringent and need to be eased to support the start-up ecosystem in the country. The association suggests that there should be tax breaks and incentives for individuals supporting start-ups with capital.
3) Incentivize Internet services start-ups: Internet services based start-ups form the bulk of internet companies in India. Comprising aggregators, digital advertisers and online classifieds, bring in a lot of efficiency, and are the largest employment generators. They are either enabling businesses, or they are creating lot of employment in the country, resulting in many people are earning a lot of money than they should otherwise have.
4) Service Tax: Start-ups end up paying a huge amount over the first three years in way of service tax. Survival then takes a back seat and penalties just make a struggling start-up’s life harder. The association recommends that for the first three years, the service tax could be waived off or incentivizes the start-ups, if they pay their service taxes on time.
5) Streamline taxation for e-commerce: Online marketplaces are changing the way businesses are done in India. Small players are setting up niche businesses in India and are attracting lot of investments in India. Online marketplaces bring in a lot of efficiency in the entire retail value chain from customer experience to payments and delivery.
6) Taxes on e-commerce transactions: The e-commerce marketplace industry is being subjected to onerous VAT demands from several states. They should be recognised as marketplaces and exempt from VAT demands in states. As market places they provide a service to online sellers and pay the service tax on that account. The State of Rajasthan for example treats e-commerce players as market places.
7) Boost FinTech Start-ups: FinTech plays a significant role in serving those underserved or not served by formal institutional mechanisms. They are also likely to play a significant role in various financial inclusion programmes of the government. Various forms of FinTech services such as pre-paid instruments, wallets and others create efficiency, transparency and wider reach in financial transaction.
8) P2P lending and crowd-funding need contribution from government: While some early inroads have been made in the P2P lending segment in the country, individual efforts have not translated into a policy from the government. The lack of clarity of rules and regulations has meant the industry is shooting in the dark. In the absence of dictated policy or scriptures, it is quite plausible that misguided individuals may fall prey to unscrupulous operators that may look to make a quick buck.
9) Easy KYC through Aadhar: This will allow innovators to build new services, which in turn will help bring more people under the ambit of financial services. Various forms of digital payments such as pre-paid instruments, wallets and others create efficiency, transparency and wider reach in financial transaction.
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.
