Why creators are building the fandom that brands can only aspire to

A CarryMinati livestream pulls in comments faster than most brands can moderate a single Instagram post. A MrBeast upload is treated less like content and more like an event, complete with countdowns, fan theories, and merchandise sellouts within hours. Somewhere between a gaming stream and a grwm video, audiences have stopped merely watching and started belonging. This is the uncomfortable truth the Indian advertising industry is beginning to sit with: creators, not brands, have become the country's most reliable builders of fandom.

The scale of that shift is no longer anecdotal. Boston Consulting Group has estimated that India already has between two and two and a half million monetised creators, an ecosystem it believes now influences several hundred billion dollars in consumer spending, with that number projected to compound sharply by the end of the decade. Industry estimates of India's influencer marketing spend have also been climbing steadily year on year, even as traditional brand campaigns continue to lean on reach metrics that measure impressions but rarely measure attachment. The gap between the two, reach on one side and genuine fandom on the other, is precisely where creators have quietly built their advantage.

The routine advantage
What separates a creator's audience from a brand's customer base is frequency and familiarity. A brand shows up during a campaign burst, typically a festive quarter or a product launch, and then disappears until the next flight of ads. A creator shows up every week, sometimes every day, occupying a slot in someone's morning scroll or evening wind down the way a favourite radio jockey once did. That consistency, more than any single viral moment, is what converts a viewer into a fan.

Preranaa Khatri, Chief Business Officer at Only Much Louder, the content and talent company known for backing some of India's most recognised digital voices and podcast formats, frames this as a fundamental change in how attention is earned. “Creators aren't competing for attention; they're competing for a place in someone's routine,” she says. “That changes how loyalty is earned.” According to her, audiences today are no longer following polished messaging as much as they are following people whose values, personalities and perspectives they connect with consistently over time. “That is how creators build emotional equity before commercial equity,” she explains, which is why monetisation, when it eventually arrives, tends to feel like support from a fan rather than a transaction with a customer.

Reach is not the same as belonging
None of this means brand advertising has become redundant. Reach still does the job it was built to do, introducing a brand to people who have never heard of it. What reach cannot do on its own is give someone a reason to return. Khatri is careful to draw that distinction rather than pit the two against each other. “Reach introduces people to a brand; fandom gives them a reason to stay,” she says. Her argument for brands is not to imitate creators outright but to build the same depth of connection over a longer horizon, through communities, recurring experiences and stories worth returning to, rather than a single campaign moment. “Fandom grows when people feel involved, valued and part of something bigger than a single campaign,” she adds, positioning creator partnerships as one credible route to that depth, since they already carry trust, shared interest and ongoing engagement built in.

Borrowing the creator playbook
Some of India's sharpest direct-to-consumer operators have already drawn that conclusion and acted on it, choosing to bring the creator function in-house rather than routing it through a traditional agency structure. Arjun Vaidya, Co-Founder of V3 Ventures, a venture platform that invests in and builds consumer brands, has been among the most vocal about this shift. “If I were to build a D2C brand again, I'd skip agencies and hire a 25-year-old micro-influencer to run content,” he says, arguing that the function is too central to be outsourced and needs to sit close to the founder, moving with the same agility as the culture it is trying to speak to.

His reasoning rests on a few observations from having built and backed consumer brands himself. Audiences today scroll past anything that looks manufactured but slow down for content that feels like it has a real person behind it. Social platforms also move faster than most agency approval chains can keep pace with, which is why he believes the job is better suited to someone who can shoot, edit, and publish in real time rather than wait on a sign-off. There is an economic argument too, since a retainer paid to an agency rarely buys the same conviction as a micro-influencer with under a hundred thousand followers who is genuinely invested in the work.

“When you hire a creator, you're hiring culture,” Vaidya says, pointing to Zomato, Mokobara and Groww as examples of brands whose content is now shaped by young, in-house creators who understand the internet on its own terms, sometimes going on to become recognisable faces in their own right. The harder part, he admits, is keeping such talent incentivised and stable in a role that does not always come with the security of a traditional job. Still, his conclusion is unambiguous. “It isn't about heavy budgets and huge teams,” he says. “It's about moving at the speed of culture, and these guys get it best.”

When fandom becomes a business
The same trust that lets a creator sell a product without sounding like they are selling has also pushed many of them to launch brands of their own, a trend that Ronit Thakur, Founder of Be Rolling Media, a content and media consulting outfit that works closely with creators and D2C founders, believes is widely misread by the industry. Kusha Kapila's shapewear label UnderNeat, Parul Gulati's hair extension brand Nish Hair, Deeksha Khurana's fashion line Dee Clothing and Diipa Khosla's skincare brand indēwild are only the more visible names on a list that grows every month, prompting a familiar question about whether the creator economy is overextending itself.

Thakur argues that is the wrong question to ask. What creators have understood, in his view, is something most traditional founders take years to learn. “They already have the one thing money can't buy, a room full of people who trust them,” he says. But having an audience is not the same as having a business, and he is careful to separate the founders who built genuine conviction from those who launched because a manager pointed at a follower count. Kapila, he notes, did not set out to become a founder so much as she kept running into a real problem with innerwear that no existing brand was solving, building a community around that pain point long before a product existed.

Gulati's story follows a similar arc, needing affordable hair extensions for a shoot, finding nothing suitable in the market, and starting production herself with her mother in a small room before it grew into a label. “These aren't influencer brands,” Thakur says. “These are founder stories that happen to have built-in distribution.” The ones destined to fail, in his reading, are the ones built backwards, a product bolted onto an existing audience rather than a problem the creator genuinely set out to solve. “Audience is not a moat,” he says. “Conviction is.”

What brands are still missing
Put together, the three perspectives point to the same underlying gap. Creators have built fandom by showing up consistently, staying themselves recognisably and letting commerce follow trust rather than lead it. Brands, by contrast, are still largely structured around campaign cycles, agency hierarchies and reach targets that were designed for a media environment where attention was scarce but loyalty was assumed. That assumption no longer holds. As India's creator economy continues to scale, the industry's more pressing question may not be whether brands can compete with creators for attention, but whether they are willing to rebuild their own systems around the kind of consistency, community and conviction that earns fandom in the first place.