Before the internet: the celebrity era
In India the idea that a trusted face sells a product was perfected on television in the 1990s. Cricketers and film stars became the standard vehicle for national brands, and the logic — reach plus trust — is the same logic creators use today. What was missing was the middle: anyone between a superstar and a stranger.
Early 2000s: blogs and forums
The first non-celebrity influence came from writing. Blogs, forums and review sites let people with expertise — food, travel, gadgets, parenting — build small, loyal readerships. Brands noticed slowly. The audiences were niche and the tools for measurement barely existed, but the pattern was set: authority built on consistency, not fame.
2005–2010: YouTube and the vlog
Video changed the economics. YouTube let ordinary people build large audiences with a webcam, and gave them a commercial model through advertising revenue. Tutorials, reviews and personality-driven vlogs made creators recognisable in a way text never had. The first sponsorships followed.
2010–2015: Instagram and the personal brand
Instagram turned identity into media. A feed was a magazine about one person, and fashion, beauty and travel creators became the first influencer marketing category brands bought at scale. This is where the word “influencer” entered marketing budgets — and where the celebrity model was copied, with a few big names taking most of the money.
2015–2019: India gets cheap data
India’s own inflection point was price. As reported from TRAI data, the average cost of wireless data fell from roughly ₹226 per GB in 2015 to under ₹12 by 2018. Hundreds of millions of people came online for the first time, on phones, in their own languages. The creator economy stopped being an urban English phenomenon.
2020 onward: short video and the regional turn
The ban on TikTok in 2020 pushed India’s short-video audience onto Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and home-grown apps like Moj, ShareChat and Josh. Short video became the discovery format, vernacular content became mainstream, and the number of creators multiplied. By 2021, industry reporting described influencer spend rising by about 40% in a year, with micro-creator earnings and vernacular campaigns growing fastest.
Now: from influencers to infrastructure
The current phase is less about individual influencers and more about systems: brand budgets moving from celebrity deals to squads of small creators, disclosure rules from ASCI, financial-content rules from SEBI, and platforms that match intent to creators at scale. Which is where India’s story and Oye’s begin to overlap.