Influencer hiring gets smarter as brands look beyond follower counts

A million followers was once enough for a brand to hire a creator, based on the assumption that a larger audience meant greater reach and, therefore, greater value. But the rise of creator databases and artificial intelligence (AI) tools is allowing brands to look beyond follower counts and assess audience quality and behaviour, giving them more ways to determine which creators are worth hiring.

The creator pool in India has grown more than fourfold, from 0.96 million people in 2020 to 4.12 million in 2025, according to a 2026 report by the Indian School of Business and HashFame, a networking app where brands and agencies can connect directly with creators.

With more creators competing for brand work, creator-brand networking platforms are helping brands sift through a much larger pool using digital databases. For instance, Qoruz, a creator intelligence platform, organises creators by category, location, industry and audience characteristics. Its database covers approximately 2 million creators across Instagram, YouTube, X, Facebook and Snapchat, which it tracks in real time.

Anirudh Sridharan, co-founder of HashFame, describes the change in the hiring approach as a move from ‘vanity metrics’ to ‘utility metrics’. He said that while ‘reach’ used to be the starting point, brands are now placing less emphasis on the size of a creator’s audience and more on how people respond to their content.

Fluencity.Social, an autonomous AI platform managing deals for creators and agencies, has identified five factors that brands now consider before hiring creators.

The first is audience authenticity, which helps identify and filter out bot-driven activity. The second is verified engagement, including comments, direct messages and conversational inquiries. The third is down-funnel attribution, which tracks outcomes such as affiliate sales and promo-code redemptions. The fourth is pricing or contractual efficiency, which determines whether creators can close deals and deliver agreed content on time. The fifth is ‘vernacular resonance’, or the ability to connect with audiences through regional language and cultural context.

The changing criteria are also making nano and micro creators more relevant to brands. Nano creators, with fewer than 10,000 followers, and micro creators, with fewer than 100,000, have smaller but more focused audiences, giving advertisers access to more engaged, niche communities.

Sridharan says 60-70% of influencer campaign budgets now go towards micro and nano creators, up from roughly 30-40% just 3-5 years ago.

“One of the biggest changes in the creator economy is that influence is no longer concentrated in the metros. Creators from tier-2 and tier-3 markets often have a very strong understanding of their local culture, language, humour and consumer behaviour. That gives brands access to communities that can be difficult to reach authentically through a metro-centric campaign,” said Siddarth Singhal, head of talent at Creators@Collective, the creator representation arm of Collective Artists Network.

This is why Creators@Collective’s focus as a representation business is evolving towards creators who have a clear niche and a strong connection with their audience, irrespective of where they come from or the size of their following, Singhal said. “The opportunity is not just in finding creators with reach, but in identifying talent that has built real relevance and trust within a particular community.”

The growing use of smaller creators, however, also means agencies have to manage a much larger number of people for each campaign. Shashank Jarial, co-founder and chief executive officer of Fluencity.Social, said a campaign involving 50 micro creators could require significantly more manpower than one involving a single large creator. So, AI is now helping agencies handle this additional workload.

“Across our network, we are seeing AI handle 90% of the back-and-forth like contract redlining and initial follow-ups. The remaining 10% involves a human-in-the-loop for final approvals, backed by all the gathered data,” Jarial said.

But there is another underlying reality: participation has grown faster than monetisation. HashFame noted that while more micro and nano creators received brand opportunities, the rapid growth in creator supply also put downward pressure on pricing.

The 2026 ISB-HashFame report shows that the number of non-metro creators participating in brand campaigns rose from about 38,000 in 2020 to more than 408,000 in 2025. At the same time, the average number of campaigns secured by each active creator fell from about 0.37 to just 0.10, with most creators undertaking only one paid campaign annually.

However, Singhal emphasized that while AI and creator databases are making it easier for brands and agencies to discover and manage creators at scale, this has not necessarily translated into lower payouts for creators. Instead, greater access to creator data has made pricing more transparent.

“Indicatively, nano creators can earn anywhere from ₹10,000 to ₹15,000 per campaign, while [for] micro creators [it] can range from ₹25,000 to ₹50,000 or more, depending on the category, engagement, deliverables and usage rights. What has changed is that brands now have much more choice and data available to them. So, creators who have a clear niche, strong audience connection and consistent performance can still command a premium, even at a smaller scale,” Singhal said.