iWorld
Bigg Boss OTT to significantly impact overall digital revenues on Voot
Mumbai: At a time when film producers are tentatively considering direct-to-OTT releases, broadcaster Viacom18 boldly launched its biggest property – Bigg Boss- on its digital platform Voot with an impressive line of sponsors.
‘Bigg Boss OTT’ debuted on its streaming platform on August 8 with film producer Karan Johar hosting the show. There were 13 contestants brought exclusively for the digital platform. The OTT special edition will stream on Voot for the first six weeks following which it will be aired on Colors TV.
“This strategic move can help with an asset like ‘Bigg Boss’ which already has a loyal following on television, which coupled with targeted marketing, made available by performance marketing, can greatly help increase subscriber revenue and user base on the OTT platform,” said Starcom, managing partner, Gautam Surath.
The broadcaster has roped in ‘presents’ sponsor Vimal Paan Masala, while the food delivery platform Swiggy and cryptocurrency exchange platform CoinDCX were brought onboard as ‘co-powered’ by sponsors. The overall sponsorship is estimated to be upwards of Rs 15 crore.
According to Voot, season 13 has so far garnered 20 billion minutes of watch time, 1.5 billion views and reached 40 million viewers. Industry estimates suggest Season 13 of the show has earned around Rs 180-200 crore in advertising revenues from nine sponsors and about 100 advertisers.
“The OTT space is growing at a pace of nearly 35 per cent CAGR as per recent industry reports. Last year due to lockdown and also limited programme choices available on TV, we saw the total paid subscribers going up by 30 per cent in the initial months of FY 21. In the recent months we have also seen a huge growth in original content being released on OTT first,” said dentsu X India’s partner – client leadership, Saurabh Shrivastava.
The launch of the digital property was no less than any TV launch. A full-page jacket ad was splashed on the Sunday edition of Times of India Mumbai, alongwith TV and OOH campaigns.
The digital viewership for reality TV show has been steadily growing at 30-50 per cent since season 10. While reach data for season 14 has not been made available by Voot, media planners estimate that it has grown by 40 per cent. “Purely from the Voot streaming app perspective, season 14 has seen a 40 per cent increase in viewership over last year, garnering 1.5 billion minutes of watch time in the launch week”, observed Starcom’s Surath.
“As an OTT platform, Voot has been growing YoY. It was estimated that Voot reached over 100-110 million MAU at the end of season 14. ‘Bigg Boss’ on Voot clocked close to ~1.5 Bn views during season 13 and it certainly crossed 2.2-2.5 billion views in season 14”, said Havas Media India’s head – digital services, Rohan Chincholi.
The six week-long digital reality series could also act as a launch pad for ‘Bigg Boss season 15’ that will air on television, and contestants from the digital show may make an appearance on the TV reality series.
“With Big Boss getting released on OTT, it will have a lot of traction from young consumers in terms of the time spent and content engagement. A particular mention for Karan Johar as host, as well as participants Shamita Shetty, Neha Bhasin, and Moose Jattana, who are already social media sensations, would bring in new viewers and give this version of the show a lot more eyeballs” added Shrivastava.
Apart from its sponsors, ‘Bigg Boss OTT’ may also attract a lot of advertisers for its digital inventory, according to industry experts. In the past, telcos, mobile handsets, e-commerce, fitness, food delivery, internet companies, insurance, consumer electronics, apparel, home services, fast food, auto and tyre brands have been active advertisers on the digital stream of the show.
Advertising demand on OTT platforms has also essentially doubled in the post-Covid era as more and more viewers have turned to streaming platforms. “This greatly increases the advertising competition, which paves the way for smarter performance marketing strategies that dive deeper into audience targeting, creative intelligence and data analytics. And, in turn, lead to greater RoI, according to agency experts.
Commenting on the cost per mile (CPM) for the digital inventory of the show, Performics’ director of app marketing, Almog Ramrajkar said, “The average cost comes to about Rs 0.12 per impression so the CPM comes to about Rs 120. ‘Bigg Boss’ offers video ad ranges starting from up to 6-seconds to 45 seconds ads which come at a CPM of Rs 120 to Rs 690 respectively.”
The digital stream of the show had a pan India presence reaching over 1200 towns and cities. Internal data shared by Voot in 2019 showed that viewers from NCT of Delhi and Maharashtra saw the highest levels of engagement for the show, followed by Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Karnataka and light levels of engagement from Gujarat, Haryana, Chandigarh, Rajasthan, West Bengal.
“Female audience under the age group of 18-24 has the highest engagement rate for the show with more than 95 per cent completion rate of every unseen clip. A major part of the ‘Bigg Boss’ audience on Voot are tech-savvy urban millennials especially women with high purchasing power and propensity to buy online. Advertising to such an affluent audience is the perfect fit for e-commerce and digital-first brands,” said Ramrajkar.
“Usually, it is an equal split between male and female audiences. The 18-34 age bracket is the most engaged on the platform. More than 50 per cent of the engagement comes from Tier 2 and 3. Mostly youth brands from lifestyle, retail, FMCG, entertainment and automobile categories, associate with this property”, added Havas Media’s Chincholi.
Considering that Voot roped in eight sponsors for season 13 and 11 advertisers for season 14 and the significant growth in viewership of the show year-on-year, ‘Bigg Boss OTT’ will likely have a significant impact on overall digital revenues for the AVOD business.
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
CALIFORNIA, 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.
