66% of India's 'internet influencers' now from non-metro cities
66% of India's 4.12 million creators now operate from non-metro cities, according to a new report from the Indian School of Business and Hashfame. This isn't a minor shift; it's a structural rebalancing of a market that was 56% metro-led just five years ago.
The Growth Disparity is the Real Story
The non-metro creator base grew 6.4x between 2020 and 2025, scaling to 2.72 million individuals. In the same period, the metro creator pool grew 2.6x. This isn't metro saturation; it's the rapid creation of entirely new markets. The total creator pool quadrupled from ~960,000, but 72% of that net new growth originated outside the eight major metros.
Language Economics Drive the New Map
While Hindi accounts for 42% of creators, the majority produce content in regional languages—Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, and others. The report notes that several of these language ecosystems see creator participation outpacing brand investment, indicating a supply-demand imbalance. For brand campaigns, concentration is high: FMCG, e-commerce, and BFSI sectors run over half of all influencer plays. The geographic and linguistic fragmentation of the audience demands a corresponding fragmentation of marketing spend.
