An agency billed a brand ₹2 lakh, while the creator received ₹60,000. What happened to the rest is standard practice.
Most creators who sign with a talent management agency in India never see the invoice their agency sends the brand. For Pujarini Pradhan, a Midnapore-based creator known as @lifeofpujaa, the difference between those two numbers was ₹1.4 lakh. She earned ₹60,000 for two brand deal videos, while her agency had billed the brand ₹2 lakh. When she found out, she still owed the agency a 20% commission on the ₹60,000 she had already received.
The weeks of controversy that followed went in every direction except the useful one, that is class resentment, authenticity debates, accusations that she was an “industry plant” manufactured by the same agency she was now criticising. What nobody examined was the simpler question: how does a brand pay ₹2 lakh for content that earns its creator ₹60,000, and why does this happen so routinely that no one in the industry finds it bizarre?
Here’s how India’s creator-agency system actually works, and who it’s built to serve.
How an influencer marketing agency find creators
India has between 2 and 2.5 million active digital creators, while only 10% of them monetise effectively and this is the gap where agencies operate.
The pitch is usually the same for all, where creators make the content, and the agency finds the brand that pays them for it. Agencies scout early-stage creators, increasingly in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and offer to handle brand outreach, pricing negotiation, and deliverable management in exchange for a commission. In 2026, the emphasis has shifted toward micro and regional creators, who are driving engagement that metro-based influencers can no longer replicate at scale.
However, scouting is not neutral. When an agency onboards a creator, it immediately starts shaping them into a more brand-friendly product with a standard script, specific lighting setups, and ready-made reel templates optimised for the algorithm. The agency’s goal is to make the creators predictable to brands, platforms, and their own portfolio metrics but what gets lost is often exactly what made the creator interesting to an audience in the first place.
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Agencies also conduct reverse engineering of platform algorithms like studying which formats hold attention past three seconds, which hooks drive shares, which posting cadences maximize reach. For creators who lack their own infrastructure, this is genuinely useful. The problem is that the creator rarely owns this analysis, the methodology behind it, or the brand relationships it eventually produces.
What’s in the contract: the clauses that matter
The standard creator-agency agreement in India is a commission contract with a talent management wrapper. It typically has four things: commission rate, exclusivity, contract duration, and payment timelines. How these clauses are written determines almost everything about how a creator actually gets paid.
Commission rates across Indian agencies range from 15% to 30% of the brand deal value. The critical question is what the commission is calculated on. Is it a percentage of what the brand pays? Or what the creator receives after the agency takes its margin? Answers are different for each and most contracts do not specify that. Agencies operating on a net margin model are under no legal obligation to disclose the gross deal value. A creator like Pujarini earning ₹60,000 from a ₹2 lakh deal and then paying 20% commission on that ₹60,000 is like funding the agency twice.
Exclusivity clauses range from category-specific restrictions to prohibitions on working with other agencies or pursuing independent deals. A creator who signs an exclusive agreement without a minimum deal guarantee has handed over their earning capacity without a floor. If the agency doesn’t close deals, the creator can’t go elsewhere.
Contract duration usually runs 12 to 24 months whereas exit clauses are usually tied to notice periods of 30 to 90 days. Some contracts include financial penalties for early termination, these are the clauses that creators rarely scrutinise when they’re excited about having representation.
Payment timelines are where friction accumulates the most. Brand payment cycles in India run 30 to 90 days post-deliverables. Creator payment from the agency often runs on a separate schedule. Creators who haven’t negotiated specific payment terms routinely wait far longer than they should, with no contractual leverage to push back.
None of this is necessarily illegal. All of it is standard practice.
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India’s agency tiers
India’s influencer marketing sector is projected to reach ₹3,375 crore by 2026, growing at 18% annually, according to Ernst & Young. That’s a market large enough to sustain multiple distinct tiers.
At the top sit premium talent management firms representing celebrity creators and controlling access to the highest-value brand deals. These agencies have genuine leverage in negotiations: legal counsel, minimum deal guarantees, and brand relationships built over years. Their creators are protected by enforceable contracts but this tier exists largely for creators who are already established enough that they don’t need protecting.
The mid-tier is where most working creators end up. These agencies focus on campaign execution and brand partnerships, operating on volume with dozens of creators, multiple simultaneous campaigns, managed through standardised processes.
Monk Entertainment, known as Monk-E, co-founded by Ranveer Allahbadia and Viraj Sheth, sits at the upper end of this tier. With more than 80 influencers, a collective monthly reach of roughly 300 million viewers, and revenue approaching ₹100 crore in FY2023-24, Monk-E represents what a scaled mid-tier operation looks like.
Below the mid-tier are boutique and niche agencies, often built around a single category be it beauty, gaming, regional language content. These agencies typically lack the brand relationships of larger firms, which means the deals they close are smaller and the margins they take can be on the higher side.
At the base are tech-enabled marketplace platforms that match creators to campaigns through data. These tend to be more transparent on pricing but offer little in the way of negotiation support, brand positioning, or career development.
The structural problem
Influencer marketing is brand marketing, and brands in India have long treated agencies as their primary interface. According to Ernst & Young, 77% of brands express confidence in agencies to manage their influencer campaigns. That confidence is built on agency accountability to the brand and not to the creator. The creator is an input to the campaign, not a client of the agency in any meaningful sense.
An agency that maximises the gap between what it charges a brand and what it pays a creator is operating rationally within the current system. There is no transparency requirement that would expose that gap. There is no industry body enforcing a code of conduct on commission disclosure, yet.
Until that changes through standardised disclosure requirements or a regulatory framework with actual enforcement, the ₹60,000 vs ₹2 lakh dynamic will keep repeating. The only variable is whether the next creator finds out.
