Two internets, one phone
India’s creator economy runs on two overlapping sets of platforms. The global pair — Instagram and YouTube — carry most brand budgets, most measurement tools and most of the creators brands already know. The home-grown short-video and community apps — ShareChat, Moj, Josh and their peers — carry hundreds of millions of users who came online after 2016, mostly in Indian languages, mostly outside the metros. The same phone has both. A brand that plans for only one is planning for half the country.
Instagram: Reels, stories and the shop window
Instagram is the default for fashion, beauty, food and lifestyle, and the platform on which most creator campaigns are still briefed. Reels is the discovery format, stories are the conversion format, and DMs are where creators actually talk to buyers — which is why Oye’s Auto-DM feature lives there. Its weakness is language depth: strong in English and Hinglish, thinner as you go regional.
YouTube: the research engine
YouTube is where Indians research before they buy — phones, bikes, courses, appliances — and where creators earn platform revenue at meaningful scale. Long-form reviews in regional languages and Shorts for reach make it the home of electronics, automotive, education and finance content. Search behaviour means a good review keeps selling for years.
ShareChat, Moj and Josh: Bharat’s feed
Where Oye runs today: the platform activates creators on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Moj, ShareChat, Josh and WhatsApp channels are on the roadmap; the notes below describe the audience, not current coverage.
ShareChat, reported at over 350 million monthly users across fifteen-plus languages, is a community platform first — posts, statuses, regional trends. Its sibling Moj (160 million-plus) and Josh (around 150 million) are short-video apps that grew into the space TikTok left in 2020. Audiences skew tier-2 and beyond, content is overwhelmingly vernacular, and creator campaigns here reach people Instagram never will — often for less.
WhatsApp and Facebook: the group is the medium
Neither is a “creator platform”, and both matter enormously. Purchase decisions in India are made in family, colony and market WhatsApp groups; Facebook groups are where local buying and selling happens in smaller towns. Creator content lands in these groups by forwarding. WhatsApp channels now give creators a broadcast tool of their own.
Choosing by intent, not by habit
The platform is a property of the intent: a Kannada review of a ₹15,000 phone belongs on YouTube; a Marathi store-opening reel belongs on Instagram and WhatsApp; a Bhojpuri detergent trial belongs on Moj and ShareChat. On Oye the platforms are a field in the brief, and the creators are matched accordingly. See the industry use cases for platform choices by category.