I studied Indian Influencer Market for 6+ months. Here's all you need to know.

The newly emerged Billion dollar market is set to Brands shelling out as much as millions on a single campaign. What are campaigns? It's simply paying a bunch of influencers to post what a brand wants, collectively called a campaign.

The second side of this story has the newly found small screen celebrities, lip syncers, bloggers, gurus, youtubers, and actors. All these people have one thing in common - "pushing content". While some make a good amount of money to manage a decent lifestyle, a lot other "influencers" struggle to make some bucks based on their social media following. One reason - they have no idea how to. Anyway, that's not our concern for now. I have been observing the influencer trends specifically for India - laugh all you want, I created a blank account and followed all the major influencers across all categories to find who's doing what and it worked. It's definitely not stupid if it works. What I have observed may or may not surprise you:

1) Bollywood:

Yes, Bollywood takes the major part of influencer money in India. It's not difficult to find a pattern in a closed environment. While the top lot use their social media to promote their own brand endorsements, and as much as political campaigns disguised as awareness campaigns. Besides this, the major campaigns in India for Bollywood are for Banks and Mobiles. Yes, you heard it right. Banks. Premium cards, festive offers, life insurances, you name it. It's in there.

Below is the most recent campaign carried out by HDFC on a bunch of Bollywood celebrities. This snapshot is an example of how it's carried out.

Secondly, mobiles, the fast growing mobile phone market with cheap smartphones and fast growing cheaper internet plans in India has people accessing internet more than ever and are the main target audience for these campaigns.

While I have no idea how much they charge for such a post, here's how it works:

They all have a manager, if you're famous enough you don't need to contact brands looking for campaigns. Brands approach you on emails and even on direct messages on Instagram.

Also, here's a highlight of the this whole manager story. Most managers have no idea what they're doing technically.

Here's an example of a Bollywood actress randomly promoting three different mobile Brands in less than an year:

yes, now you know!

2) Youtubers and Lip Syncers:

The smartest of the lot. The top youtubers in India definitely know what they're doing with their followers unlike the Bollywood. Although, they're not as expensive as the top-end Bollywood celebrities, but they're definitely expensive for a small scale startup. The truth is, youtubers are starting to learn how to price themselves well. Most youtubers handle their own brand promotions while outsourcing most of their work. Not just that, they're innovative in what they do. They start their own merchandise brands, strategically partner with gadget startups and brands, smartly place them as holders in their content. Trust me, the smarter ones put brands into your head without you even noticing.

Here's an example of a Youtuber with a Jack & Jones placement without anybody noticing it.

Top youtubers can make your life feel terrible. They earn free vacations and airline tickets partnering up with Airways and Travel Consultancies. This is not all, free stays, goodies, gadgets and most importantly the fan love which goes unnoticed even by Rolling Stones!

Gadget startups like Mivi, One Plus and Vivo are very active when it comes to using their influencer campaigns. A few of the youtubers even earn royalties over sales just for promoting the Gadget Maker Mivi over their social channels and again - all of these are strategically placed and you can't tell unless you have a keen mind. Top Indian Comic-Youtuber Bhuvan Bam is also one of the faces of the gadget startup Mivi India.

While youtubers have their own game sorted, the newly found Tiktok influencers are also pivoting to cash themselves. Although the brands don't care as long as they find their audience, the fewer possibilities for a brand placement in Tiktok influencer's campaigns is relatively making them less buck but this may change pretty soon. It depends on how smart the tiktok users are. The truth is, I have no idea.

3) Beauty, Travel and Fashion Bloggers:

Although, there's only a few top beauty bloggers who get paid a lot for endorsing a beauty brand, like cosmetics or anything that makes your life easier. It's very difficult to pin point on a specific Blogger to see how much they make over a post but they sure do. Beauty influencers don't do just one thing, they also combine travel and fashion and post glamorous shots of their life on social media attracting more brands and endorsements for themselves. Most often, the beauty, travel and fashion bloggers get invited to Bollywood celebrity's launch events for more coverage in their niche. For example, Katrina Kaif recently launched Kay for Katrina in October 2019 and invited a bunch of fashion bloggers to cover her event.

Most beauty bloggers get paid very less but very often, they get freebies from brands for an endorsement. So next time, when you see a beauty blogger promoting a cosmetic on their stories - you understand they only got a freebie for it and not paid.

Here's a snapshot of one of top indian beauty bloggers with her Olay India product placement.

Here's another influencer on a Lays India campaign that made a lot of Indians upload the similar kind of image promoting brand awareness for Lays.

A lot of these beauty bloggers partner with fashion startups and the biggies among with the likes of Myntra and Nykaa.

4) Fitness, Lifestyle and other influencers:

There's nothing specific that's out of the box for lifestyle or fitness influencers that differentiate them from Beauty, travel or Fashion influencers. They try to launch their own brands and work with brands while they recommend some products. Even though they suggest they're not Brand placements and are completely based on their personal experience, my suggestion is that Do not believe them. They're brand placements. Period.

5) The rest of the lot (Micro):

Even though the micro influencer trend isn't fully functional in India, the influencers between 10k-100k followers on social media have a little game in making money out of their following. They mostly get freebies and are main targets for small scale startups looking for some exposure. These micro influencers charge quite less for their influencer posts and are easily available over DMs. So if you're a small business owner in India and looking to target a niche, you know where to go to.

As a key part of a Global Influencer Agency, I have even personally spoken to a bunch of users from India on Instagram with followers ranging from 100k-250k and asked them what they're looking for in terms of monetizing their social media following. All of these users who haven't monetized their account have one thing in common. The fear of hate. Yes, influencers are scared of the hate they may receive from their followers if they monetize their accounts.

"I have no idea how to monetize my account, I sometimes see Direct Messages to promote a brand and I think to myself if I want to do this. I don't want to be hated for pushing brands on my loyal followers", says a user with 180k followers on Instagram.

Maybe someday they will open their doors to monetize their accounts or not but I can say one thing, these people are admired and they have built themselves a loyal user base. The loyal ones include people who have tattooed their favorite Instagrammers's and Youtuber's tattooes on their bodies. So the craze is legit but how often the users take their brand promotions, can be spotted by a few minute details like coupon codes, referral codes etc. That's the only way and if not that, there's a lot of Brand awareness. Let's switch to an interesting view point that doesn't just look at India as a bonus.

The overall view point at Social Media influencers:

Although a few documentaries on an online streaming platform, Netflix like The American Meme and The Fyre Festival exposed a lot of influencer gimmicks causing Million dollar Lawsuits, Jail time and a massive fraud, the users have become more aware of branded content and sponsored posts but this doesn't effect Influencers from Monetizing their following. They have to make a living and Brands don't mind spending.

The most money flows in Influencer Marketing through Meme accounts who also run their own agencies. This is actually surprising for an average user but globally, memes sell stuff. A creative money manager app called Meet Cleo based in London, England was promoted entirely through memes and now has 1.7 million user base so now you can imagine. This is just one example and there's many more.

On the contrary, Indian users don't seem to be effected a lot by these Netflix documentaries, a very less portion of people watch documentaries. People who watch documentaries are nerds according to most of them. Being an Indian, I never told anyone that I sometimes donate to Wikipedia for their work, oh god, I will be judged so hard. Also a study by Vice says Indians are watching a lot more movies than ever. I can confirm this, every person I meet once in a month have asked me, "What movies did you watch?" and I go "The Exterminating Angel, it's released in 1964" and I see their faces go blank.

With this let's conclude this article. You must be awfully surprised I'm not trying to sell anything so this article is followed by a short introduction to myself.

About Me:

I'm Murli Kanne, a 27 year old aspiring Tech Entrepreneur who's dived into Social media world by an accident and today, I manage Global Influencers with a total network of over 20m+ followers through an agency we've built (which soon will also be a publisher). Apart from this, I've been working for about 5 years on a product called Fliier, a city specific social networking platform to change how people approach social media in their day to day lives. I have crashed 3 Betas for Fliier so far and you can call this my ambitious attempt to capture the next billion users. I also do a bunch of crazy things but for now, this must be enough.