Neel AcharyKlugKlug’s Data Unveils India’s INR 10,000 Crore Influencer Marketing Reality, Triggering Industry-Wide Debate on Massive Undercounting
New Delhi, Dec 08: KlugKlug, a leading global Influencer Marketing SaaS platform, recently did an industry analysis on the true size of India’s influencer marketing industry. With this analysis, KulgKlug claimed that India’s influencer marketing industry has surpassed ₹10,000 crores in real deployment. This figure stands in sharp contrast to the popularly quoted estimates of ₹3,000–4,000 crores, prompting a wave of discussions across marketing leaders, agencies, and digital commerce communities. Within hours of publication, the report caught the eye of business forums and professional networks, drawing attention to the widening gap between conventional measurement systems and the actual scale of the creator economy.
After the report top line was released, the data circulated widely among marketers and among industry stakeholders, exposing long-standing gaps in traditional measurement frameworks. The widespread attention that this analysis got reflects that influencer marketing is no longer remains as a minor advertising channel, but a major economic force that has outgrown outdated methods of estimation. According to the report, only one-quarter of India’s influencer marketing spend moves through visible, organised channels, while the remaining 75% occurs directly between brands and creators. At the same time, India’s fast-scaling D2C landscape is reshaping spend behaviour, with more than 100 brands independently deploying upward of ₹20 crores annually through in-house creator teams rather than agency-led structures. Alongside this, 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.
Talking about the market growth, Kalyan Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO, KlugKlug commented,
“Influencer Marketing has fundamentally changed in the era of 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. Agile brave young brands are taking away market share across consumer categories within months of launch and there’s a ton of e-commerce correlated data that underscores the data scienced power of Influencer and Content Marketing. With intelligent influencer marketing platforms, and KlugKlug leading that story, brands finally have visibility into what truly works across the creator landscape. This is a turning point for the industry and it’s much larger already ”
Commenting on this, Vaibhav Gupta, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer, Klug Tech Private Limited, said,
“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. With this new analysis, we tried to bring much-needed clarity to the industry. This data is not just a correction but the beginning of a transformation in how influencer marketing is measured, understood, and valued in India. Our goal is to enable a more transparent, data-driven foundation for the ecosystem moving forward.”
The report’s findings highlight that thousands of micro and nano creators have quietly become the backbone of digital commerce, and how D2C brands increasingly rely on internal influencer engines deploying upwards of ₹20 crores annually. It is this combination of scale, invisibility, and economic impact that has captured the industry’s attention so intensely. The spike in conversation also reflects a deeper truth about how India’s creator economy has evolved faster than the tools traditionally used to understand it. Marketing leaders, agencies, and even investors are now recognising that this attention marks a turning point and seeing it as an opportunity to rebuild the industry’s measurement foundation with more precision, transparency, and data-driven rigour.
