Microdrama Emerges as Mainstream Entertainment Format in India, Report Finds

ShareChat and Moj released their first major industry report on microdrama in India this week, and the findings amount to a quiet confirmation: what started as an experimental format has become the way millions of Indians now spend their entertainment time. The report, produced in partnership with Kantar, surveyed more than a thousand viewers across fourteen cities between May and August, asking straightforward questions about how people watch, what keeps them coming back, and what it all means for the creators and advertisers betting on the format.

The numbers tell a story of rapid normalization. Eighty percent of audiences now prefer microdrama to other forms of short-form content. More striking still: eighty-six percent of viewers spend more than fifteen minutes watching every single day, and fifty-four percent come back for repeat sessions. These are not the metrics of a novelty. They are the metrics of habit—the kind of consumption pattern that shapes how platforms allocate resources, how creators plan their work, and how brands think about reaching people.

Neha Markanda, the chief business officer at ShareChat and Moj, framed the shift in language that captures something real about what has changed. Audiences, she said, are not simply looking for shorter videos. They are looking for stories that fit into their mobile-first lives while still delivering the emotional continuity and narrative depth that long-form content provides. Microdrama, in other words, has solved a problem that short-form video never quite managed: how to tell a story that matters in the time people actually have.

The advertising data reinforces this. Microdrama delivers eighty-four percent brand recall and eighty-two percent purchase intent—metrics that outperform traditional short-form content. For brands, this means the format creates what researchers call a high-attention environment. People are not passively scrolling past ads; they are actively engaged with the stories around them, which means the ads land differently.

Perhaps the most revealing finding concerns who is actually watching. Sixty-eight percent of microdrama viewers come from households earning more than ten lakh rupees annually. Sixty-four percent travel more than twice a year. Sixty-three percent own their homes. This demolishes the assumption that microdrama is a format for casual viewers or lower-income audiences. It is, instead, reaching India's spending class—people with disposable income and the time to develop viewing habits. Seventy-seven percent discover microdramas through social media feeds, which speaks to how the format has embedded itself into the discovery mechanisms people already use every day.

Ebu Isaac, Kantar's head of media and analytics for South Asia, noted that the research revealed something larger about how India's digital landscape is evolving. Audience attention is being reshaped by new formats and new viewing behaviors. Microdrama is building engagement by combining frequent, mobile-first consumption with the pull of episodic storytelling—the promise that there will be another episode, another story, another reason to return tomorrow.

The report was based on a quantitative study of 1,045 respondents across NCCS A, B, and C segments, aged eighteen to forty-four, conducted between May 4th and May 25th, 2026. An additional attention module with 450 respondents, conducted between May 21st and May 29th, compared how audiences engage with microdrama against long-form content and traditional short-form videos. The methodology is straightforward; the implications are not. If microdrama has truly moved from emerging trend to mainstream format, then the next question is not whether it will grow, but how fast, and what it will displace.