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From reels to episodes: 80% Indians embrace microdrama as new entertainment habit. ET Bureau Last Updated: Aug 13, 2026, 01:24:00 AM IST Microdrama is now a mainstream Indian entertainment format, with most audiences preferring it. Viewers spend over fifteen minutes daily watching these short, episodic stories. Social media feeds are the primary source for discovering new microdrama content. This format shows strong brand recall and purchase intent for advertisers. Microdrama offers creators and brands opportunities for deeper audience engagement. Microdrama is emerging as a mainstream entertainment format in India, with 80% of audiences expressing a preference for the format and 86% of viewers spending more than 15 minutes watching it every day, according to the State of Microdrama in India, an industry report released by ShareChat and Moj in partnership with Kantar. The report examines changing consumer behaviour, viewing habits and storytelling preferences around microdrama, while also assessing its potential for creators, brands and advertisers. The study finds that 54% of viewers return for a repeat viewing session, suggesting that microdrama is moving beyond novelty and becoming part of regular entertainment consumption. Social media also plays a key role in discovery, with 77% of viewers saying they discover microdramas through social feeds. The report highlights the broad demographic and economic profile of the audience. Some 68% of viewers belong to households with annual incomes above Rs 10 lakh, while 63% own a home and 64% travel more than twice a year. The findings indicate that microdrama's audience extends across different economic segments rather than being limited to a particular consumer group. Everyday-life stories emerged as the most preferred storytelling category, selected by 36% of respondents. The report suggests that relatability, combined with the convenience of short-form viewing and the continuity of episodic storytelling, is helping drive engagement with the format. The study also points to opportunities for advertisers. According to the report, microdrama generated 84% brand recall and 82% purchase intent in the advertising assessment, with the format showing stronger performance on these measures than traditional short-form content. Commenting on the findings, Neha Markanda, Chief Business Officer, ShareChat & Moj, said that microdrama has evolved from an emerging format into a distinct entertainment category. She said audiences are seeking stories that fit naturally into mobile-first lifestyles, combining the convenience of short-form consumption with the continuity and emotional depth of long-form storytelling. The report also highlights the growing role of microdrama for creators, brands and platforms, with episodic storytelling offering opportunities for deeper audience engagement and more narrative-led brand communication. Ebu Isaac, Head of Media and Analytics, Kantar South Asia, said the research reflects a broader evolution in India's digital content landscape, with audience attention increasingly shaped by new formats and viewing behaviours. He said microdrama is building engagement through frequent, mobile-first consumption combined with episodic storytelling, pointing to its potential as an emerging entertainment category. The State of Microdrama in India report was commissioned by ShareChat and Moj in partnership with Kantar to examine the emergence of microdrama as a mobile-first entertainment format and its impact on consumer behaviour, content consumption and advertising effectiveness. The quantitative study covered 1,045 respondents across 14 Indian cities between May 4 and May 25, 2026. Participants were smartphone and social media users aged 18-44 years across NCCS A, B and C segments. The study examined audience preferences, viewing habits, storytelling behaviour and engagement with microdrama. An additional attention module, conducted between May 21 and May 29, 2026, included 450 respondents and compared audience attention across microdrama, long-form content, and short-form videos/reels.

Nielsen's $2 billion DoubleVerify acquisition is a big play for CMOs. Aug 12, 2026, 5:00 AM PT CMOs: Get ready to field more sales pitches from Nielsen. The TV ratings giant surprised the ad industry by announcing plans to buy DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion - and sent chins wagging with hot takes about the implications. At stake: trustworthy data. CMOs depend on data to craft their strategies, but it's often patchy and unreliable. That's why they need credible auditors to double-check - or double-verify, if you will - those numbers. For CMOs, this deal could simplify audience measurement and ad verification, but consolidation would mean greater concentration of power under Nielsen and one fewer independent player. Eric Salama, former CEO of data firm Kantar, told me the deal signals Nielsen's intent to move further into helping CMOs plan and allocate their media budgets. That, in turn, would mean building more direct relationships with advertisers rather than primarily serving media owners and agencies. "As an advertiser, when you think about attribution and planning, you don't think of Nielsen, really," Salama said. Building a single measurement currency. DoubleVerify made its name helping advertisers ensure their digital ads are viewable, free of fraud, and served alongside suitable content. It has since expanded into the ad performance space, in areas like campaign optimization and outcomes measurement. DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski said in a statement that the combo would deliver "a single currency that scores media on both audience delivery and media environment quality." A single currency also means placing faith in a single referee to determine what constitutes "quality" media. In acquiring DoubleVerify, Nielsen would own both the tools that measure an advertiser's reach and those that test the purity of their media buys, Nomad Foods CMO Justin Billingsley wrote on LinkedIn. "Together they are the two facts that let a buyer trust what a seller claims, and from 2027 they will sit inside a single private company whose own accounts nobody outside can read," Billingsley said. DoubleVerify, previously publicly traded, will retain its name and separate corporate structure as part of Nielsen, which is privately held. (No NielsenVerify yet!) That separation might ease some concerns about potential conflicts, but it could also make the benefits of the combination harder for advertisers to see - at least in the short term. Ad measurement goes private. Once the deal closes, expected next year, there'll be even less public financial scrutiny of the ad measurement space as DoubleVerify exits the public markets. Nielsen itself has been privately owned by a private equity consortium since 2022. Meanwhile, DoubleVerify's closest rival, Integral Ad Science, was taken private by PE firm Novacap last year. The not-so-small matter of integrating the two companies once the deal closes could open the door for rivals to pounce, touting their independence. "Mediaocean and Peer39 will be interesting to watch," said Jay Friedman, cofounder of the adtech and martech discovery platform CartographAI, referring to measurement rivals that could take advantage. Will Luttrell, the former CTO of DoubleVerify rival IAS, said that while conventional wisdom sometimes holds that private equity is where innovation goes to die, the opposite can also be true. "It's an opportunity to make the longer-term bets and bigger swings that quarterly earnings scrutiny may not allow," Luttrell, who now runs the cybersecurity startup Honeycake, told me. IAS, for example, hired Lidiane Jones as its CEO last month. "They are replacing someone with a revenue background in the top chair with a bona fide software engineer," Luttrell said of the new IAS CEO. "It's hard to maintain long-term success without a technical person in the top chair, especially in a competitive industry that requires constant reinvention like adtech." Marketers have spent years trying to make fragmented measurement systems work better together so they can understand both who their ads reached and whether those impressions were actually valuable. Nielsen-DoubleVerify promises some of the unification marketers are looking for, but the trade-off is a bigger reliance on a single company to provide it.