India’s influencer industry now worth Rs 10,000 crore; most spend off the books: Report

Influencer

India’s influencer marketing industry has surpassed Rs 10,000 crore in real deployment, according to analysis by influencer marketing SaaS platform, KlugKlug.

This figure stands in sharp contrast to the popularly quoted estimate of Rs 3,000–Rs 4,000 crore, said the platform's Co-Founder & CEO, Kalyan Kumar.

According to the report, only one-quarter of India’s influencer marketing spend moves through visible, organised channels, while the remaining 75 percent occurs directly between brands and creators.

It added that the creator economy operates far beyond the visibility of traditional tracking methods, with thousands of micro and nano-influencers driving substantial brand investments.

Also, over 20 agencies individually generate over Rs 20 crore in annual revenue. But this represents just the organised sector—the tip of the iceberg in the broader influencer marketing ecosystem.

At the same time, India’s fast-scaling Direct-To_Consumer (D2C) landscape is reshaping spend behaviour, with more than 100 brands independently deploying upward of Rs 20 crore annually through in-house creator teams rather than agency-led structures.

Additionally, founder-led initiatives, product seeding, and barter-driven collaborations continue to produce high Earned Media Value (EMV), even though such initiatives do not appear as formal spends in advertising models, the report added.

Vaibhav Gupta, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer, Klug Tech Private Limited, said that the gap in India’s influencer marketing numbers has existed largely because the industry relied on limited, agency-visible datasets that never reflected the full picture.

Kumar said that influencer marketing has fundamentally changed in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, and precision targeting. "What we are witnessing now is not just growth but a structural shift in how commerce, content, and consumer intent converge."