eNews
Arnab stomps into digital space with republicworld.com
MUMBAI: The game has just begun! That is what he had stated on his last day at Times Now. And Republic TV’s founder editor Arnab Goswami is living up to that promise.
Two months from the day he announced the launch of the news channel Republic TV he has formally announced the unveiling of its digital cousin –Republicworld.com – on 7 July.
And it looks like an impressive offering to say the least. First of all, the design and the look of republicworld.com is very clean, and visual heavy with news being segregated under various sections right from general news to politics to sport to lifestyle to tech to entertainment. Of course, visitors can also watch Republic TV’s shows such as Arnab’s Sunday debate, The Anupam Kher show, R.Access, Patriot, and the new one: The Nation Wants to Know.
But, the killer app is that the reader can customise the language for the site, according to his preferences. Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, English Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, and Odiya are the options given to him.
Republicworld has been able to offer that wide a range of thanks to its partnership with various media houses with eight of them being specifically with digital outlets. The media partners include Business World, OTV, Sambad, News Live, Niyomiya Barta, North East Live, Punjab Kesari, Aajkaal, S Newz, Dainik Bhaskar, Nirmana News, Kashmir Monitor, Lokmat, Vikatan TV, Polimer, Asianetnews.tv, Asianet News, Kannada Prabha, Suvarna News, News Mobile.in; across India and the community partners include tripoto.com, RSJ, LBB.in, yourstory.com, digit.in, and AutoX.
Additionally, what strikes you is the experimentation that is being attempted on republicworld.com in the form of the handful of 360-degree videos that have been put out on the site. Republic’s video content is being streamed in HD with the app slated for a launch in the next three weeks. It will feature long-format live and VoD content in the form of vertical videos, especially created for mobile audience as reported by indiantelevision.com on 30 June.
Some may call this as resorting to gimmicks, but Team Republic says they know what they are doing.
Says Republic TV CEO Vikas Khanchandani: “Innovation is very critical to succeed. We were clear that we want to differentiate. Look at the digital success and traditional success stories. Often, one of the primary reasons behind the triumph is technology, which is as important as content. Also, one needs to understand the consumer and the journey across platforms. Therefore, it’s critical to make sure that you are able to draw up a strategy that gives you maximum reach.”
Adds Republicworld.com COO Jay Chauhan: “In the digital content space, there is no dominant global player operating out of south Asia, and that’s a big opportunity for us. Republicworld.com is at the intersection of content and technology, so we will keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible to constantly engage and improve upon the user experience.”
Clearly, Chauhan is the right man for the job. Arnab and Khanchandani poached 20-years NDTV veteran from the Prannoy-run outfit. During his career at the news network, Chauhan headed its technology consulting division and bagged numerous international awards for technical innovation.
The editorial responsibility for republicworld.com has been put in the hands of deputy news editor Sriram Sivaraman. And a team of 30 – including editors, producers and journalists – are running the site.
Says Chauhan: “Within India, regional content consumption is growing exponentially, and with the excellent network of our digital partners, this launch reaffirms our objective to work as a force and consistently engage with our audience in the language and habit of their choice.”
On the technology front, RepublicWorld has tieups with American and Canadian companies. Pierre Friquet (VR director/ writer/ consultant) from Canada and Ando Shah (founder & CEO at Tesseract) from San Francisco trained its producers for a month to shoot content in VR.
Sources indicate that republicworld.com will be burning cash in excess of Rs 2 crore a month, something which Khanchandani is unwilling to confirm. Says he: “Content delivery is a significant cost, and it will expand. Our investment will increase as more and more consumers will start consuming.”
With that high a burn rate, it’s imperative that revenues start kicking in – and quickly. But, Khanchandani says that has already been taken care of as some of the ad deals it has signed for Republic TV include republicworld.com. He and his team will be reaching out to sign on newer advertisers too.
He explains: “We were waiting to make the digital announcement, and now, it’s a good time to go to market. We will have sponsored content. If you look at the landscape of display advertising, it has changed significantly. If you see revenues of Yahoo and Microsoft, display business has come down — dramatically. Video is easier to buy and create. Video advertising, native advertising and sponsored content is what we are looking at.”
Republicworld.com seems to be luring in visitors if one looks at its traffic statistics, courtesy Amazon-owned web tracker Alexa. According to this morning’s update, Alexa showed that republicworld.com had screamed up 179,000-odd spots to rank at 38,167, amongst all sites globally. And its Indian rank is a healthy 2,830. What’s important is the engagement in terms of the amount of time being spent on the site: a healthy 3 minutes and 33 seconds per visitor session. However, it has a high bounce rate of 65 per cent.
As TV viewers would confirm, Arnab does this to people.
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.
