India does not have a shortage of influencers. It has a shortage of influencers who earn repeatedly.
A 2026 study by the Indian School of Business and Hashfame estimates that India's creator population grew from roughly 960,000 in 2020 to 4.12 million in 2025. And that two-thirds of these creators reside outside of metro regions.
That creator population boom has, nevertheless, not resulted in an equivalent rise in earnings. In fact, most influencers today continue to participate only sporadically in any paid campaigns. The creator economy has solved discoverability long before it has solved monetization.
Becoming a Creator Became Cheap
Twenty years ago, the production and distribution of media was capital intensive, requiring access to TV studios, press publishing houses, distribution networks and more.
Today, a creator only needs their phone to produce video and text content, and the reach multiplier function of Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms to achieve distribution. An individual in a tier-3 town can reach a national audience without migrating to Mumbai.
The ISB-Hashfame study underlines this trend. The number of non-metro creators rose 6.4 times between 2020 and 2025, as compared to 2.6 times for their metro counterparts. While the internet made more people creators, it also changed the geography of influence.
Supply Grew Faster Than Demand
The obvious consequence of the creator explosion has been the oversupply of content. The demand from brand advertisers did not keep pace with the deluge of social media posts. The ISB-Hashfame study found that non-metro creator participation in brand campaigns rose from roughly 38000 to 408000 between 2020 and 2025. However, even as the number of creators engaging with brands rose, the majority continued to participate in only a few campaigns, while the ratio of brand campaigns to non-metro creators dropped, as total creator supply increased.
Monetization opportunities opened up for many, but not for most. It is important to recognize that there is a qualitative difference between someone who has done a few brand campaigns and someone who has multiple revenue streams, including repeated brand collaborations. Influencer marketing as a career continues to be intensely capital-intensive. Most creators are not able to rely on influencer marketing as their primary source of income.
Brands Want Small Creators For A Reason
The economics of brand budgeting mean that the big creator is not always the best creator. An ad budget can be deployed to either a single creator with a large audience, or multiple smaller creators with more targeted audiences.
A creator with a following of 10 million is obviously valuable. However, that same budget may be used to reach 10 different creators who can reach hyper-local audiences. India is a country with a fragmented consumer base that spans dozens of languages, and has seen the rise of multilingual content creation.
According to ISB-Hashfame data, Hindi remains the language of choice for 42% of creators, with other languages accounting for the rest. A brand advertising a shampoo may find that engaging with local creators is a better way to reach local shoppers in tier-3 cities, rather than using a national celebrity.
The Attention Market Grew Too
One would think that if four times as many people were creating content, existing audiences would have to be split four times thinner. In practice, according to ISB-Hashfame data, engagement rates rose steadily, from an average of 1.8% in 2020 to 7.2% in 2025. More Indians were finding social media and engaging with content.
More Indians have joined the attention economy, and more regional content was available. Algorithms continued to improve, focusing on helping smaller creators reach niche audiences. The Indian creator economy has seen a rise in both quantity and quality. But the latter was not matched by a rise in either pricing power of individual creators or budget increases from brands.
The Creator Is Becoming A Sales Channel
In the past, a brand would buy media. That is, it would buy space in a publication, or airtime on TV channels.
A creator, meanwhile, has multiple touchpoints with the audience. The creator is simultaneously a media publisher, a face for the brand, a production studio, a distribution channel, and sometimes a retail sales channel. Creator marketing therefore typically has a bigger budget impact than the creator's slice of the economic pie suggests.
BCG has estimated that Indian creators influence hundreds of billions of rupees in consumer spending, even if only a tiny percentage accrues to the creators and platforms directly.
One Campaign Is Not A Career
This brings us to the economics of the creator career. A creator typically works on a project basis. An advertiser will typically budget between 5-10 times the creator's fee as a marketing expense. But if a creator only works on one campaign every 9 months, it is not a sustainable business model. For an individual creator, the key to a lasting business is to transform sporadic expenses into ongoing revenues. This could be achieved through multiple sponsorship deals, affiliate marketing, YouTube monetization, product sales, masterclasses, live events or other structures.
The ISB report underlines the importance of this theme, creator productivity, and the capacity to drive repeat monetization, will be crucial to the next phase of the creator economy.
Platforms Win Even When Creators Do Not
There is one final paradox to the creator economy. A social media platform has little interest in any one creator, even as it accumulates millions. The economics are asymmetrical, the platform only needs a constant supply of creators to keep the content pipeline open. A creator who fails to deliver on a brand campaign is a creator who fails to deliver eyeballs to an advertiser.
More eyeballs mean more ad inventory sold. The platform will benefit from that, even if it failed to meet the expectations of one creator. That is not to say that the system is predatory, the same could be said for newspapers and traditional media. It is in the platform's interest to promote creators and make them commercially viable. However, the survival of the platform is more immediately threatened by the loss of a creator than the loss of an advertiser. The creator needs scale, and repeat monetization, to survive. The platform needs the creator to keep producing content, and to expand its own audience base.
The Next Influencer Boom Will Be About Businesses
India has had the easy phase of the creator revolution, turning millions of Indians into creators. The hard part will be to turn these creators into businesses. Can influencers sustain their audiences over time, and turn their influence into recurring revenue?
Can brand advertisers identify small influencers who are likely to deliver sales impact? Can local creators obtain repeated brand collaborations, rather than a single campaign? Can the creator economy develop business models that survive algorithmic shifts? Can creators move beyond social media platforms and develop alternate distribution channels?
India has seen the dawn of a creator society. The next frontier will be businesses.