YouTube Shorts, microdrama platforms can co-exist: Google India's Dhamankar

With various microdrama platforms, serving short-form storytelling, booming in India, Manish Dhamankar, Google India’s head of media and entertainment, said that he does not see a competition to YouTube Shorts viewership as there is enough audience for everyone to “coexist”. 

YouTube Shorts, with a reach of around 650 million users in India, and microdrama platforms are together driving a broader ecosystem for such content. Sixty nine per cent of Indians are increasingly seeking relaxing content across multiple platforms in the evening, Dhamankar said. 

He said India’s media and entertainment industry is highly fragmented, with users using about 6.5 streaming platforms on average for content consumption. This extends to microdramas, where 63 per cent of viewers use two to three apps and 17 per cent use more than five apps, according to Google and Qualtrix Survey 2025.

 

 

“YouTube is the gateway for discovery for a lot of this content. It is one of the top five sources of discovery for OTT content, according to the study that we did. This is why even platforms that are standalone OTT and microdrama apps are leveraging the scale and personalisation of YouTube to make their content discoverable. I believe all of us coexist, and there is enough audience demand for all of them to coexist,” said Dhamankar. 

YouTube also has a vast reach across about 75 million users in India through the connected TV (CTV) segment. This comes at a time when many episodic microdramas are already consumed on YouTube Shorts. 

Dhamankar added that microdrama has become a major emerging phenomenon in India’s media and entertainment space, with strong users, companies, and venture capital demand. 

This follows over 250 million installs in this category this year, while November saw five of the top 10 free entertainment apps to be Indian microdrama apps. 

Some of the microdrama platforms that Google India is working on in this segment are Dashverse, which produced India’s first AI-powered microdrama, and microdrama platforms like Quick TV, Zee Entertainment Enterprises’ Bullet, and Pocket TV for advertisements. 

He highlighted that through its artificial intelligence (AI) tools like Gemini (used for ideas and research), NanoBanana (used for storyboarding and realistic images), Veo 3 (video production and post-production), and Chirp (audio generation, multi-language dubbing), it has helped microdrama platforms like Dashverse to scale its production capacity. 

Meanwhile, Zee5 used Google’s AI tool called ViGenAir solution to have a 95 per cent reduction in editing costs and cut its time-to-market for its content’s trailers. Citing EY’s report, he added that AI can increase revenue by 10 per cent and reduce production costs by around 10 per cent for the media and entertainment industry. 

On enabling other content creators or filmmakers to launch their films on YouTube, Dhamankar noted that YouTube has always been a creator-first platform.

 

“YouTube is a platform where we give this platform for users to kind of distribute their content, and the personalisation that we have or the sheer reach that we have, as well as the way of reaching out to the relevant users with the relevant content, helps this content get discovered by the target audience as well,” he added. 

 

”That is something that we provide, and we really encourage content creators to use our platform to distribute their content,” he added.

 

With media and entertainment being a key sector for the Indian economy, Dhamankar said that Google India is committed to help the sector grow and provide its tools for the entire flywheel, from content creation to distribution to growth and monetisation aspects.