iWorld
Jagran New Media continues to grow; crosses 100 mn users mark
Mumbai: Jagran New Media (JNM), a digital arm of Jagran Prakashan said that it has surpassed 100 million users in the news/information category. According to the report ‘Comscore MMX Multi-Platform: June’22,’ as JNM reported, the company registered a growth of 19 per cent in total unique visitors to 100.60 million. With 384 million total views and 485 million minutes time spent, JNM said that it has witnessed an annual growth of four per cent in total unique visitors and consolidated its position as one of India’s top ten news and information publishers, which augurs well for monetisation.
Jagran New Media provides real-time content across genres, with news and politics being the primary drivers. Education, lifestyle, health, auto, and technology are also significant contributors to this growth, it said.
Jagran New Media CEO Bharat Gupta said, “Content, technology, and policy are the new building blocks for any new-age media company. Our mission is to produce factual and credible content that enables and empowers the new India through knowledge, information, and POV towards better health, better education, and better growth, leading to an inclusive and progressive society. We have made significant investments in content + technology to provide an engaging and secure experience at the product end, while also protecting the digital expansion of Cookie Fadeout through the use of the DMP.”
“News/information category witnessed a drop in FY 2021-22. The algorithm change aimed at making the news ecosystem more expert-driven, authoritative, and trust-based, as well as the post-UP election traffic, were the two big reasons for this drop. Eight out of the top 10 news and information companies witnessed a sharp annual decline. Thanks to our audience-first strategy, wherein we have different products for different audience segments, which helped Jagran New Media witness growth. In all, we are gearing up for the next billion users by way of a scalable and sustainable business model,” he further explained.
Jagran New Media chief revenue officer Gaurav Arora said, “We are all set for the festive season and are hopeful of an action-packed season this year. Our primary goal at Jagran is to reach out to our advertisers with innovative solutions across genres. The segmented approach has previously yielded results, and we are currently aiming high in the auto, tech, lifestyle, FMCG, and gaming categories as part of our overall revenue plan. We are introducing new products and IP’s to enable brand solutions that are out of the ordinary.”
Jagran New Media has an array of offerings under the media and publishing category. Within the Hindi news and information category, the company’s flagship brand, Jagran.com, further consolidated its position with constant growth in terms of users, page views, and time spent. It clocked a reach of 44.61 million unique visitors, 166 million total views, and 229 million total minutes of reach.
In the education category, JagranJosh.com said that it has 43.79 million total unique visitors, 124 million total views, and 140 million minutes of spent time and registered a growth of 98 per cent in total unique visitors, 86 per cent in total views, and 87 per cent in total minutes. JagranJosh.com also registered an annual growth of 138 per cent in total unique visitors, 167 per cent in total views, and 171 per cent in total minutes.
In the health segment, Onlymyhealth.com maintained its leadership position in the Indian health-information category with 7.09 million total unique visitors, 11 million total views, and 13 million total minutes time spent, registering a monthly growth of 30 per cent in total unique visitors, 41 per cent in total views, and 30 per cent in total minutes, and an annual growth of 91 per cent in total unique visitors, 23 per cent in total views, and a 28 per cent increase in total minutes.
In the women’s and lifestyle category, HerZindagi.com maintained 18.22 million total unique visitors, 28 million total views, and 31 million total minutes. JNM consolidated its video presence by clocking 67.18 million video views and witnessed a growth of 120 per cent during the month of June’22 (Source: YT analytics).
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.
