eNews
A year after demonetisation: E-payment services emerged winners
MUMBAI: 8 November 2016 was a day that took the world by storm. While the world was stunned with Donald Trump’s victory as the new US president, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi decided to give the country a shocker of its own- demonetisation.
An ordinary Tuesday evening saw all news channels and radio stations halt their programmes to listen to Modi, assuming it as another Mann Ki Baat. Instead, what followed was the shocking revelation that all the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes in the country will be invalid post midnight. As people scrambled to get rid of their notes and lined up for new ones, they were restricted to just Rs 10,000 a day and Rs 20,000 a week for the next 4 days (10-13 November).
A severe cash shortage in the hands of the public forced them to seek alternative modes of payment. Companies too weren’t spared. By the second week of demonitisation, cigarette sales had dropped by 30-40 per cent and cash on delivery (COD) orders fell by 30 per cent for e-commerce companies. Dabur India corrected its advertising spends for November by almost 50 per cent and many prominent brands decided to hold the rolling out of new campaigns for a few months. The festive October-December quarter, this year, ended up draining out over Rs 2000 crore.
Amidst this confusion and loss, if there was a clear winner, it was the class of startups offering online wallets and digital payments. Brands offering online payment ‘cashed’ out the most from the prime minister’s move. It was time for overlooked and unrecognised players like Paytm, Freecharge, Mobikwik, Swiggy, Zomato, Foodpanda and others to make optimum utilisation of the situation. These brands had found people’s Achilles heel and created campaigns, tweaking their communication, to show people that you don’t need to worry about less cash.
With this, digital payments became India’s new currency and debit card transactions surged to over 1 billion in January this year from 817 million last year.
Foodpanda India co-founder and CEO Saurabh Kochhar says that there were positive implications of demonetisation on its platform. “Before demonetisation, on a regular day, our platform would receive close to 70,000 orders. While that shot up by 40-50 per cent, around 92 per cent of payments were made online after demonetisation. As our order value ranges between Rs 400-500, consumers did not mind paying online,” he reveals.
As consumers were forced to get acquainted with digital payment modes, they got comfortable with the idea of paying for their orders online. Brands ensured their technology backend could support the surge in payments so that no glitches would leave people harassed or with bad experiences.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of demonetisation was online wallet app Paytm. Within only 12 days after the move was announced, Paytm witnessed over Rs 7 million transactions worth Rs 120 crore a day and Rs 5,000 crore worth of transactions in the month of January 2017.
Even though India was cutting down on spending, online travel grew between November 2016 and June 2017. Indians spent $246.6 million in overseas travel-related payments in November 2016, up 581 per cent as compared to $36.2 million spent in the same month in 2015. Arrivals from India to Australia since the demonetisation period (Nov 2016 – Aug 2017) grew at an average of 15 per cent.
A year on, are people still transacting online at the same pace or was it just the momentary fluster? Kochhar optimistically says, “As valid currency got into a normalised flow in the country, there was an increase in COD orders. However, we have seen more uptake in users paying online for their orders. It is more about the change in the mindset of the users and demonetisation pushed them in that direction for sure.”
While demonetisation opened people’s eyes to digital avenues, adex was briefly hampered. Overall brand revenues fell and there was a clear dip in sale, but all of that is now in the past. The advertising and marketing industry revved up but was assured that India’s suspicious view towards digital had surely been changed.
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.
