India’s Media Market Poised for Massive Growth Driven by Digital Creators

According to a new PwC India forecast reported by Livemint, the country's media and entertainment sector is on track to nearly double its economic weight by 2030, expanding from $25.7 billion in 2025 to $36.7 billion at a compound annual growth rate that runs roughly twice the global average. For the growing class of Indian creators who have turned regional-language video, gaming streams and short-form feeds into full-time careers, the projection isn't abstract: it maps the infrastructure that pays their bills. The engines behind that expansion are precisely the ecosystems creators already live inside — internet advertising, OTT video and gaming.

The shape of the expansion

The headline figure hides a starker redistribution of revenue. Internet advertising alone is projected to nearly double, climbing from $7.5 billion in 2025 to $14.3 billion by 2030 at a 13.9% clip, powered by search and video formats. OTT video — the streaming environment that now hosts reality franchises, sports simulcasts and the kind of serialized drama that YouTube reviewers dissect weekly — is forecast to rise from $2.2 billion to $3.6 billion over the same window. Gaming and e-sports, long treated as a peripheral subculture, are expected to reach $2.6 billion from a 2025 base of $1.5 billion, an 11.3% compound rate.

It is the combination of these categories, more than any single line item, that tells the cultural story. Each one runs on the labour of identifiable creators: the regional-language vlogger monetised through pre-roll, the mid-tier streamer whose subscriber tier matters less than the ad-revenue floor, the e-sports caster building a personal brand alongside a team. The PwC India outlook assumes, implicitly, that this creator class keeps producing the raw material that makes the platforms worth advertising against.

From landgrab to layered monetisation

What is changing, according to the people quoted in the Livemint report, is not the hunger for audience but the architecture of monetisation. Rajesh Sethi, partner and leader for media, entertainment and sports at PwC India, described a market that has matured past the expansion-first phase: "Until a few years ago, the game revolved around landgrab and scale. Now, all players are moving towards improving monetization layers and looking beyond advertising and subscription to develop intent-based advertising strategies and intelligent data warehouses to measure real audience behaviour." Sethi added that artificial intelligence has moved past editing and visual effects to become a tool for value-based integration across platforms.

That shift lands directly on the creator economy. Hybrid revenue — ad-supported tiers, mobile-only plans, lower-priced subscriptions — is replacing the assumption that audiences will pay full freight for content. For creators, the implication is that reach alone becomes less valuable; the platforms are learning to differentiate between a viewer who scrolls past and one whose behaviour can be measured, targeted and sold. As Munish Vaid, vice-president at the consultancy Primus Partners, noted in an earlier interview cited by Livemint, advertising on OTT now offers "higher level of targeting and measurement capabilities in comparison to traditional TV" — a structural advantage that pulls marketing budgets away from broadcast and toward the platforms where creators operate.

What creators should watch

Three under-the-radar numbers from the same outlook carry more weight than the headline for anyone planning a content business. Data connectivity revenue is projected to climb from $36.5 billion in 2025 to $58.6 billion by 2030 — a reminder that the pipes carrying every reel and stream are themselves becoming the largest sub-sector in the Indian media stack. Regional-language content is flagged throughout the report as a structural driver rather than a niche. And AI-driven monetisation tooling is moving out of post-production and into the way platforms rank, package and price creator output.

For creators operating in a market expanding this quickly, the risk is not whether the pie grows but who gets to slice it. As the sector scales, the kind of analytical frameworks once reserved for larger enterprises increasingly apply to creator businesses too, and the questions of operational resilience that used to sit on the desks of logistics or finance executives now sit on the desks of mid-tier influencers and studio teams. The decade ahead will reward those who treat audience attention as a measurable, auditable asset rather than a vibe.