iWorld
Twitter launches first-ever #EveryCharacterMatters Week
MUMBAI: Starting June 13 Twitter India will celebrate young creators and users in its first-ever week-long live showcase called#EveryCharacterMatters. This curated showcase across Comedy, Lifestyle, Modern Romance, and Music will see over 20 comedians, chefs, musicians, stylists, and more, harness Twitter, Vine and Periscope to connect and create with their followers.
#EveryCharacterMatters, as the theme suggests, will highlight how every content genre, every character, every personality has a voice on Twitter, and the curated showcase will be a reflection of the diverse youth and creative voices of our country. #EveryCharacterMatters will celebrate new forms of digital and live storytelling, and will help users discover and interact with new creators across their daily lives.
This week-long showcase will also encourage the creator in every user on the platform, and will showcase how best to use Twitter’s tools and features. Onecan join the conversation by following @VideoIndia account or #EveryCharacterMatters hashtag on Twitter, which is the best way to get live updates about the program. On the web, go to www.everycharactermatters.com to check out the #EveryCharacterMattersconversations unfold in real time.
“Twitter is current and live – it’s just like serving a dish at the restaurant – you get instant feedback. I can bounce off ideas for seasonal menus at The Bombay Canteen with our followers and I can also reach out to them asking about new ingredients I come across. I often look to Twitter for travel tips, and hyperlocal recommendations from foodies in the city I am visiting. Twitter helps build connections, inspires my work, and I learn something new everyday through my conversations,” says chef Thomas Zacharias (@ChefTZac) at The Bombay Canteen.
“#EveryCharacterMatters will put a spotlight on the new young, delightful, hyperlocal Twitter. It will allow people to enjoy their interests such as food and music in a new dimension, and in a more inclusive and collaborative manner. The content across categories on Twitter is authentic and relatable, and that helps us redefine digital lifestyles on the world’s largest live communications platform today,” says Twitter India Lifestyle and Culture Partnerships Keya Madhvani.
#EveryCharacterMatters will spotlight young Indian talent across genres, and all week these users will tell their stories in new, creative, multimedia content forms using Tweets, photos, videos, Vines, and Periscopes. They will collaborate with Twitter users for a richer experience by asking people to Tweet their ideas, lyrics, sound clips, and will involve them in the creator’s journey. You can journey with a musician in the making of a new track, or you can accompany a blogger as he walks down the streets of Bandra as he enjoys the local street food. Twitter brings you closer to all your favourite things, and you can enjoy them in ways you had never imagined – through candid conversations, live video broadcasts, and short-form videos.
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.
