iWorld
Free Fire’s creator Total Gaming inks exclusive NFT partnership with Stan
Mumbai: Bengaluru-headquartered blockchain-based esports fan engagement platform Stan has announced entering into a strategic non-fungible token (NFT) partnership with the world’s most-followed and popular Garena Free Fire creator and Asian gaming creator – Total Gaming aka Ajju Bhai. The idea and objective behind this collaboration is to create an ecosystem for Total Gaming fans to engage with them optimally through the use of NFTs and other perks. As a part of this collaboration, Stan has now secured the exclusive rights to create and sell NFTs of Total Gaming. Furthermore, the partnership enables Stan users to get access to multiple interactions with Total Gaming, mainly through Instagram Shout-outs and Play-a-Match services curated by Stan.
Stan co-founder & COO Nauman Mulla said, “As a new-age fan engagement startup working with and for the gaming and esports community in India, Stan is committed to partner with the best talents in the industry, and also to empowering fans and bringing them closer to their favourite esports creators by using NFTs and the marvels of web3. And to that end, Total Gaming aka Ajju Bhai, being one of the most followed and popular esports creators in India and the world, was a must for us to tie-up with. We are delighted to announce that our engagement with Total Gaming going forward, shall enable Stan users over the short-term to get to interact and play with the creator, i.e., Total Gaming himself, whereas in the long run, we at Stan will be additionally hosting multiple mega fan fests and unlocking other valuable fan experiences for Total Gaming’s fans.”
Creator Ajay (Total Gaming) said, “I am excited to be a part of Stan’s journey. That will enable my audience to engage with me on a whole new level. With this collaboration, we are aiming to reach unprecedented and seamless levels of new-age engagement with my fans and followers.”
Notably, Total Gaming was started officially as a Youtube channel back in 2018 by Ajay (fondly known as Ajju Bhai), with the sole intent of entertaining and engaging with the gaming community on the Internet. Over the years, Total Gaming’s popularity and follower-base have skyrocketed exponentially, with its content entailing multiple games like Call of Duty Mobile, Minecraft, GTA5 and BGMI (formerly PUBG), apart from Free Fire content creation actively – which has been the major factor in driving the channel’s growth. As of date, Total Gaming has acquired over 42 million subscribers across multiple channels and has had over 6.5 billion collective views on Youtube, as well as over 3.4 million followers on Instagram.
On the other hand, Stan is a platform that allows fans to get a chance to collect, play, and trade the collectibles and NFTs of their favourite esports players and content creators, via which they will win various perks and rewards. Besides leading Indian Free Fire creators like Total Gaming, Stan has also already inked NFT-related partnerships with multiple leading Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) creators in the country.
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.
