iWorld
‘The next billion YouTube users are going to come from India:’ Ajay Vidyasagar
MUMBAI: Even as Google CEO Sundar Pichai prepares for his India trip with a mandate to outline the company’s vision for the new smartphone users in the country later this month, YouTube has trained its eyes on India in a big way. With a global community of over one billion people that gives anyone the power to create something that everyone can watch, YouTube APAC director of partnerships Ajay Vidyasagar is of the opinion that the next billion users of a platform like YouTube are going to come from a market like India.
Citing Pichai’s example, Vidyasagar adds, “Senior leaders at Google are very excited about India. India is one of our most valuable opportunities in the world. YouTube is already a mainstream platform in the country. The next billion users of a platform like YouTube are going to come from a market like India.”
As a definitive step towards its vision for YouTube’s growth in India for churning out original local content, the company has launched YouTube Space Mumbai – the destination for web content creators and aspiring YouTube stars. YouTube Space Mumbai is India’s first and the world’s 8th YouTube Space.
When asked what influenced the company’s decision to set up YouTube Space in India, Vidyasagar points out a few important stats. “While the year on year growth for YouTube globally is 60 per cent, in India the growth in watch-time has been a whopping 80 per cent. Needless to say India is a very important growing market for us. YouTube Space Mumbai is just one of the many initiatives the company has in store for the country.”
Not just as a country of viewers, but as content creators too India has seen a steep rise. “There has been a growth of 90 per cent year on year, when it comes to uploading videos to YouTube in India. So getting Spaces to further empower the creators in the country was the obvious next step,” Vidyasagar informs.
Moreover, YouTube users in India have also made an exponential shift on mobile devices to watch videos. “This year we saw 55 per cent of the total viewership on YouTube in India coming from mobile devices alone. It’s the first quarter when mobile device viewership eclipsed desktops.”
When asked what this means in a country where mobile marketing is just setting up a roadmap unlike a developed market like China, and how it can impact a YouTube content creator’s revenue, Vidyasagar says, “Our way of looking at mobile or desktop viewership is fundamentally ‘bought and sold’ on a promise of a video view, which is pretty much the same thing on any device. Therefore monetisation isn’t a challenge, even if the device changes. We actually have figures to show now that monetisation is pretty much the same in all devices.”
Further explaining the monetisation process in YouTube and how the platform gives advertisers a plethora of choices, Vidyasagar shares, “Our advertising team sells reserve advertisements and auction advertisement inventory. The skippable ads that you see are part of a suite that we offer in auction advertising. What ad will be placed on the channel is not decided by the creator but by the buyer of the advertising space. As an advertiser you can choose to buy from the reserve, which means to buy an ad in a specific channel at certain time in a certain volume. And you pay for specific price. But in an auction, you actually bid for an ad to be placed on the platform. So it is not creator led but advertiser led; we give the advertisers a lot of choice in the process.”
A veteran in broadcast media from his earlier stints at Star TV and Sun TV, Vidyasagar shares how differently a VOD platform such as YouTube functions.
“When I came to Google, I really thought YouTube is going to be a lot similar to television and very quickly I realised how wrong I was. In a lot of ways, television is a one way communication. You expect the audience to come at a certain hour to a certain television station and then go away. Everything about television is very different in terms of consumption and engagement from a platform like YouTube. Interactivity amongst creators is what drives YouTube and its community at heart. The single biggest difference for me has been realising the power of how creating, sharing and commenting plays such a big role in what was originally a one way communication,” he offers.
Comparing the television medium to online, Vidyasagar says that in his stint with television, it was mainly the opinion of a handful of decision making people that was more often than not reflected in shows. “On television, we got a very filtered version of what people thought about the content. But when content goes out on YouTube, I have a pretty strong idea of what people actually think about it. This makes you very responsible over what you put out there as a content,” he says.
That said, both YouTube Spaces global head Lance Podell and Vidyasagar stress the need to get more and more Indians be active on YouTube. While infrastructure and lack of uniform access of internet through the country, specially in Tier II and III cities remains a challenge, the duo is happy to inform that their previous marketing initiative YouTube Offline, which was first introduced to India, has borne fruit and shown a 500 per cent growth in usage across the country. Additionally, a slew of services are being thought of to pull in more users to the platform, Vidyasagar informs.
With an aim to attract tens of thousands of fully functional content creators who can add to the YouTube community and also inspire others, the 4G wave in the country will only add an impetus to facilitate the video network’s plans in India.
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.
