iWorld
TO THE NEW Venture growing 100% YoY: Puneet Johar
MUMBAI: In the wake of the digital boom, internet product & services company TO THE NEW Ventures, which specialises in emerging markets, has witnessed a 100 per cent year on year (YOY) growth.
What’s more the company’s services business has witnessed of growth of 40-50 per cent, whereas its consumer internet business comprising American Swan and #fame have also been growing 100 per cent YOY.
TO THE NEW five businesses include TO THE NEW Digital, American Swan, #fame, Blogmint and ThoughtBuzz.
#fame has been great combination of the engagement of social media with the power of live video where users can go live on a simple click of a button on their mobile.
Speaking to Indiantelevision.com, TO THE NEW Ventures CEO Puneet Johar said, “As a service company, technology and analytics are the two cores of digital offering. Content and marketing is always the icing on the cake as they clearly engage with the consumer. If you see the overall growth, our company is growing 100 per cent year on year, our services business is growing around 40-50 per cent and our consumer internet business is growing by 100 per cent year on year.”
Talking about the growing digital space, Johar added, “Smartphones, internet connections and mobile internet have all witnessed a tremendous growth so obviously people are consuming more content on mobile devices, which is an irreversible phenomenon in my opinion.”
From the advertisers’ perspective, people are using digital for engagement, innovation as well as for reach. “There are different matrixes available where people can measure their results from social media and videos. Targeting is much more superior than print or any other media as far as digital is concerned. We believe the intensity of targeting will only get strengthened over the next two years when more and more machines will come, which is already happening based on people’s past usage. We will see targeting based on more and more usage,” Johar informed.
Over the past few years, the digital space has been growing by rapidly. It’s already a big and sizable platform now. Johar said, “Approximately Rs 4000 – 5000 crore was spent on digital this year. It’s already a very big platform in India and it will only get bigger and bigger in the coming days. In the next five – six years it will become as big as print.”
While on the one hand there are the popular upper crust channels that do well in terms of viewership, on the other there are also those at the bottom rung, which don’t command healthy viewership. Johar said, “It’s very tough to aggregate and do a campaign with measured money. However on the digital platform, even on a smaller budget, one can make a good impact on the target group with creative content. One can create a lot of buzz on digital as opposed to television. In today’s time, the consumer likes to discover things, they like to interact rather than being just told about it.”
Throwing light on digital monetisation, he said, “In a business, which is just one year old, we are not worried about profitability. Currently we are more concerned about user’s usage and increased viewership. I think profitability will naturally be slow with these things.”
TO The NEW Digital invested $10 million last year in #fame and is still working with the same funds.
Reliance Jio offering a unique combination of telecom, high speed 4G internet data, digital commerce, media and payment services has already created a lot of buzz in the country. Opining on the same, Johar said, “I think everybody is looking forward to a great telecom infrastructure. Essentially data will be available to everyone at a compelling rate and it will expand the usage of data on all smartphones and PCs. It’s an exciting road ahead. It can be positive development for the digital environment.”
With rural India getting connected by the internet slowly but surely, digital players are smiling from ear to ear. “We are also looking forward to the infrastructure enhancement. While I do believe data is expensive now, the cost is likely to come down soon. Rural India will start adopting when the cost will come down. This will happen sooner or later and things will change,” he said.
Johar informs that TO THE NEW is eyeing new revenue models from advertising, subscription and gamification in the future.
Sharing his future insight about the company, he added, “For all the three businesses, we are looking at strategic partnerships. Our aim is to have at least our key businesses namely American Swan and #fame to strike strategic partnerships so as to expand the business in India and South East Asia over the next year.”
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.
