Short form, males, and 2-tier cities

Sajith Sivanandan, who is the CEO of Disney+Hotstar in India, revealed a weird statistic on short-form content consumption in India in the Nikhil Kamath podcast. It is:

Consumers of short form content in India are:
– 75% males
– from Tier 2 and below cities.

I think 2 heuristics explain this:

  • Men do not listen well. They don’t! So short attention spans, and thus, inclination towards short form content
  • But, men that I have worked with in the metros, they do listen well and ask questions. Which is why, the statistic is tilted towards Tier 2 cities.

What could be the reason for that?

  • Perhaps the fact that most men in Tier 2 cities live on survival mode – for no fault of theirs. Just generational travel. So hard skills like “paying attention and listening” are aliens to them.

No blame to anyone – just my explanation (human psychology) to a fact (data).

But data tells a lot about us, and what we want to adhere to, and what we don’t want to.