iWorld
Salman tops the chart for being most savvy on digital media
MUMBAI: Salman Khan emerged as the most digital savvy celebrity with an overall score of 16.1, according to TO THE NEW Digital Celebrity Index for the month of September. Khan ranked as number one while Shahrukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan ranked at number two and three scoring 14.6 and 14.5 respectively.
As per the TO THE NEW Digital data, Priyanka Chopra has emerged as the most active celebrity in social media, on the basis of highest number of posts on all the platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Chopra topped the chart with a total of 531 posts. Amitabh Bachchan is the second most active celebrity after Chopra with a total of 168 posts.
On Facebook, Chopra had 75 posts during the month of September whereas Bachchan was close second with 71 posts during the same month. Female celebrities are more active when it comes to Instagram as compared to males. On Instagram, Chopra has total number of 66 posts. Sonam Kapoor was the second most active celebrity with a total of 45 posts.
Chopra had 704 tweets, most of which were about her American TV show Quantico, which was launched on 27th Sep. Amitabh Bachchan grabbed the second spot in the list with a total of 140 tweets which were more generic in nature.
Madhuri Dixit emerged as the most engaging celebrity on the basis of highest number of netizens she had engaged with on all platforms including likes, comments and shares on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The posts made by Dixit were found to be most engaging among all the celebrities with a score of 11.8 M. Shahid Kapoor remained the second most engaging celebrity with a total engagement of 1.0 M. Shahrukh Khan was the most engaging celebrity with a total engagement of 694,913 for the month of September. Most of the tweets made by Shahrukh Khan were generic in nature where 32 per cent of his total tweets were re-tweets.
Madhuri Dixit received the highest engagement ratio of 47 per cent with 25.1M of total fans. Shahrukh ranked at number two with 38 percent of engagement ratio with 18.2M of total fans. Alia Bhatt, Shahid Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor ranked at number three, four and five with 34 per cent of engagement ratio with 9.6 M, 3.2M and 1.6 M of total fans. .
Deepika Padukone has the highest reach across social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram) with total of 39.8 M fans. It was also observed that despite very high number of posts, Priyanka Chopra could not gather many fans and ended up securing only fifth position among all the celebrities with total fan base of 31.7 M fans on all the social media platforms combined. Padukone had the highest number of Facebook fans among all the celebrities that was close to 27.6 M while Salman khan was close second with a total of 27.1 M fans and Amitabh Bachchan was close to 21.9 M of fans and ranked at number three. Padukone also topped the fan base on Instagram with 3.7M fans. Alia Bhatt was a close second with a total of 3.5 M fans. Priyanka Chopra secured third position with 3.4 M.
It was noticed that male celebrities had higher number of fans as compared to female celebrities when it comes to Twitter. Unlike Facebook or Instagram, Amitabh Bachchan has the biggest fan base on Twitter with a close to 17.3 M followers. Shahid Kapoor remained a close second with a total of 15.7 M fans. Even after having the biggest celebrity base on Facebook as well as Instagram, Deepika Padukone could only secure 4th place with respect to the fan base on Twitter.
Salman Khan came up as the most searched celebrity by netizens on Google with a total of 4.5 M searches during the month of September. That also overlapped the other celebrities in a big way, since the second most searched celebrity, Paukone could only secure 2.5 M searches for the same duration. Anushka Sharma bagged third position with 2.4M searches, Shahrukh Khan secured fourth spot with 2.3 M and Akshay Kumar grabbed fifth place with 1.5 M searches.
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.
