Why influencer marketing in India is still fragmented

AdSphere is a professional network and self-serve collaboration platform for India’s creator economy. Before building it, we asked a simple question: if so many products already serve influencer marketing, why does it still feel broken to the people doing the work? This piece sets out our answer. It is a point of view drawn from public data and our own interviews, not a peer-reviewed study, and we mark where we are interpreting rather than reporting.

The market has grown faster than its infrastructure

According to a 2026 study by SRITNE at the Indian School of Business and Hashfame, India had about 4.12 million creators in 2025, up from about 0.96 million in 2020, with roughly two-thirds outside the metros. Tracked brand campaigns grew about threefold over the same period, from around 14,000 to 42,000. The same study describes roughly 85 percent of creators as locked out of monetisation.

Supply of creators has multiplied. Paid opportunity has not spread with it. That mismatch is the starting point.

Five kinds of product, each solving one slice

• Discovery and analytics software helps a brand or agency find and score creators. It is built for the person paying for the software, and the creator appears as a row in a database.
• Agencies and talent managers coordinate campaigns. Their economics favour large retainers, which tends to leave small collaborations underserved.
• Marketplaces connect the two sides and process the deal. Many handle the transaction well, but the reputation that each deal generates rarely travels with the creator.
• Creator tools such as link-in-bio pages and media kits give a creator something to point to. What they show is self-reported, so a brand has little to verify.
• Social platforms hold the audience and the history. Both stay inside the platform.

Why the gaps persist

This is our interpretation, and we hold it with appropriate humility. We see three structural reasons.

1. The party carrying the risk is not the customer

In most deals, the creator delivers first and is paid later, so the creator carries the payment risk. Software is usually bought by the brand or agency. Products tend to be built around the buyer, so the person most exposed is the person least designed for.

2. Small deals are uneconomic for intermediaries

A collaboration worth a few thousand rupees costs nearly as much to coordinate by hand as one worth ten times more. Agencies and managers, understandably, spend their time where the margin is. That leaves the long tail of nano and micro creators and small brands to run on direct messages.

3. Evidence of reliability is trapped in silos

Every completed collaboration produces proof that someone delivered on time and someone paid on time. Today that proof stays in one chat, one inbox, one spreadsheet. The next brand starts from zero, and so does the creator.

What we think would close the gap

We do not think the answer is yet another database of creators. We think it is a professional home: a place that belongs to the creator, where a track record builds from real, completed work, where brands can deal with creators directly, and where being paid on time is the expected outcome of a collaboration. The profession-by-profession pattern is familiar: LinkedIn for corporate professionals, GitHub for developers, Behance for designers.

What we do not know yet

Some of this is still a hypothesis. We do not yet know how quickly brands will trust a track record built on a new platform, or exactly how much a payment guarantee changes behaviour. That is what our early-access group is for, and we will publish what we learn.

Sources and limits

• SRITNE (Indian School of Business) and Hashfame, 2026, using Qoruz data. Creator counts for 2020 and 2025, tracked brand campaigns (14K to 42K), the share of creators locked out of monetisation and the share outside metros.
• AdSphere field research, 2025 to 2026. Primary qualitative field work with 70+ creators and influencers, 15+ agencies and talent managers, and 10+ businesses across India. Qualitative interviews, not a statistically sampled survey.