KlugKlug reveals India’s INR 10,000 crore influencer marketing scale, exposing undercounted spend

KlugKlug, the global influencer marketing SaaS platform, has released a new industry analysis that is reshaping long-held assumptions about the size and structure of India’s creator economy. According to the company’s research, India’s influencer marketing industry has already crossed INR 10,000 crore in real deployment—more than double the widely quoted estimates of INR 3,000–4,000 crore. The findings have triggered widespread debate among marketers, agencies and digital commerce leaders, prompting many to question the accuracy of legacy measurement models.

Traditional market estimates account only for visible, agency-mediated spend. KlugKlug’s analysis suggests that this represents just 25 percent of the real market. The remaining 75 percent—three-quarters of all creator-led activity—happens directly between brands and influencers, outside formal agency channels.

The report argues that India’s rapidly expanding D2C ecosystem is a major driver of this hidden scale. More than 100 D2C brands now independently deploy over INR 20 crores each year through in-house creator teams, bypassing conventional agency structures.

Add to this the substantial but often unaccounted value created by founder-led content, deep product seeding, affiliate-driven commerce and barter-led collaborations, and the broader economic footprint of the creator economy begins to look dramatically larger than what traditional advertising models recognise.

Kalyan Kumar, co-founder and CEO of KlugKlug, said that influencer marketing has fundamentally changed in the era of AI, automation and precision targeting. "What we are witnessing is not just growth but a structural shift in how commerce, content and consumer intent converge. Agile young brands are taking market share within months of launch, and there is substantial e-commerce correlated data that underscores the 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,” he added. 

Vaibhav Gupta, co-founder and chief product officer, Klug Tech, added that gaps in official numbers largely stem from outdated measurement systems. “The industry relied on limited, agency-visible datasets that never reflected the full picture. This analysis 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 study also highlights the rising influence of micro and nano creators who have quietly become the backbone of digital commerce. Their content fuels ongoing discovery, trial and purchase intent, yet much of this activity remains undocumented in traditional ad spends. The analysis, therefore, has become a catalyst for introspection across the ecosystem—prompting marketing heads, agency leaders and investors to acknowledge that India’s creator economy has outgrown the frameworks used to track it.

For the marketing and advertising industry, the report signals a need to rethink benchmarks, attribution models and planning frameworks. As influencer-led commerce gains deeper integration with performance marketing and retail media, the push for transparent, scalable and data-backed measurement is only expected to intensify.