On 27 August 2025, Ikigai Law launched one of its seminal projects—a report titled Creators First: Enabling India’s Content Creator Economy. The launch event featured a panel of esteemed speakers to discuss the report’s findings: Dolly Singh (Creator), Shri Sanjay Jaju (Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting), Nell McCarthy (Vice President, Meta) and Dr Menaka Guruswamy (Senior Advocate), moderated by Anirudh Rastogi (Founder & Managing Partner, Ikigai Law).
Participants included creators, platforms, marketing agencies, think tanks, legal experts, and government representatives - reflecting the broad and vibrant ecosystem that powers India’s creator economy.
You can read the full report here.
This post offers a glimpse of the report and its findings
About the report
Over the past year, we have been closely tracking India’s role in shaping the discourse on the creator economy in the Global South. We developed the report through a combination of primary and secondary research:
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Sectoral study: an in-depth review of existing research, industry reports, and global policy developments.
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Stakeholder conversations: one-on-one conversations with creators, platforms, talent agencies, legal experts, and policy thinkers across the ecosystem.
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Expert roundtable: a closed-door discussion with leading creators, platforms, agencies, and policy experts, convened specifically for this project.
The outcome is Creators First: Enabling India’s Content Creator Economy—a research report that maps India’s creator ecosystem, analyses global trends and content policies across jurisdictions, examines the economic, operational and infrastructural challenges facing creators, and sets out forward-looking recommendations for strengthening the sector.
Why the creator economy matters
India’s creator economy represents far more than entertainment, it is reshaping culture, commerce, and policy. Creators are decentralising the way content is made and consumed, shifting influence away from traditional media gatekeepers to individuals who build audiences on the strength of their voice, lived experiences, and creativity. This democratisation of expression is fuelling both economic activity and cultural influence.
The numbers are striking. With over 4 million active creators, India’s creator economy was valued at USD 976 million in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 3.93 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 22%. Influencers alone drove an estimated USD 20–25 billion in revenues in 2024 and influenced USD 350–400 billion in consumer spending.
Creators are also small businesses in their own right, contributing to the economy and generating employment in editing, production, design, and marketing. For many young Indians, being a creator now ranks alongside being a doctor, engineer, or athlete as an aspirational career path
Equally important is their role in India’s cultural diplomacy. Much like K-content amplified South Korea’s global influence, Indian creators are sharing local stories, vernacular identities, and cultural narratives with audiences worldwide. This positions the sector as not just a driver of growth, but also a pillar of India’s soft power.
Emerging challenges
Yet, beneath this story of rapid growth lies a more complex reality. For every creator building a global following, there are many more struggling to make ends meet, battling burnout, or navigating uncertain rules. The creator economy is vibrant but fragile, an ecosystem where opportunity and precarity exist side by side.
The very features that make this ecosystem dynamic, its decentralisation, low entry barriers, and constant evolution, also create vulnerabilities. Income is volatile. Support structures are thin. Legal rules are often ambiguous or poorly tailored to the realities of individual creators.
The report identifies five structural challenges that threaten the sustainability of India’s creator economy:
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Economic fragility. Only 8–10% of creators monetise effectively, compared to 40% in mature markets. Most fall into a “missing middle”—earning too little to sustain independent careers but too committed to treat creation as a hobby. This fragile base makes livelihoods unstable. Financial instability is one of the biggest stressors for creators.
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Operational pressures. Creators are often one-person enterprises, simultaneously producers, editors, marketers, and accountants. This multitasking results in long hours and little room for skills-building or rest. Burnout is common.
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Mental health and safety. Nearly 80% of creators report high stress and anxiety from the constant demand to produce and perform. Women face disproportionate harassment and trolling, which not only affects their well-being but can lead to self-censorship and loss of voice.
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Infrastructure and skills gaps. Many creators operate without proper recording spaces, equipment, or editing tools. While smartphones and affordable software lower barriers, the absence of co-creation spaces, community studios, or subsidised infrastructure limits quality and consistency. These gaps are sharper outside metros, where patchy internet, lack of mentors, and few training opportunities compound the challenge.
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Regulatory uncertainty. The legal and regulatory environment applicable to creators in India is dynamic and continues to evolve. While this signals a growing recognition of the sector’s importance, the rules that currently or are proposed to apply to creators can be difficult to understand and even implement. This is compounded by the fact that many creators have limited awareness or understanding of legal frameworks.
Recommendations from the report
Creators First sets out a roadmap to make India’s creator economy sustainable and globally competitive. Key recommendations include:
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Structured multi-stakeholder engagement to address high-risk areas such as harmful advertising, misinformation, copyright, and child safety.
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Scaling training and capacity-building programmes for creators, covering monetisation, business skills, legal literacy, and digital wellness.
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Avoiding broadcast-style regulation, which risks stifling innovation in a decentralised creator ecosystem.
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Investing in infrastructure, including shared creator hubs, subsidised studios, micro-grants, and tax relief for small creators.
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Reinforcing safe harbour protections under the IT Act to ensure predictable and proportionate platform moderation.
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Strengthening trust and transparency between platforms and creators on takedowns, algorithms, and monetisation rules.
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Supporting creator-led communities to foster mentorship, peer learning, and collective engagement with policymakers.
Looking ahead
India’s creators are among the most dynamic actors in its digital economy. They are redefining work, culture, and commerce, while carrying India’s voices to the world. But for this sector to realise its full potential, it must be supported with enabling policies, better infrastructure, and stronger communities.
Creators First: Enabling India’s Content Creator Economy is only a starting point. The report opens up critical questions around monetisation, safety, infrastructure, and regulation, but much more work remains to be done. Building a resilient and thriving creator ecosystem will require deeper evidence, sustained dialogue between policymakers and creators, and iterative policymaking that keeps pace with the sector’s rapid growth.
At Ikigai Law, we see this report as the beginning of that journey and not the end. Our aim is to continue working with creators, platforms, policymakers, and industry to develop the frameworks, institutions, and tools that will allow India’s creator economy to flourish.
Read the full report here.
Author credits: This blogpost is written by Nirmal Bhansali, Associate with inputs from Vijayant Singh Principal Associate, Ikigai Law.
