We logged every disclosed creator sponsorship on Indian YouTube, using YouTube's own paid-promotion flag and the creator's own disclosure language.
Then we compared what different sectors got for their money. The gap is not small.
We are not claiming creator campaigns moved any brand's client numbers. They almost certainly did not, and we will not pretend otherwise to make a better story.
Groww overtook Zerodha because it built a simpler product for first-time investors, charged zero account-maintenance fees, and acquired roughly 83% of its users organically — word of mouth and app-store discovery, not advertising. Zerodha's client decline followed SEBI's tightening of F&O rules, which cut its brokerage revenue by up to 40% year on year. The entire NSE active-client base shrank about 7% in the same period. [source]
Product, pricing and regulation moved those numbers. Not YouTube.
What we ARE saying is narrower, and unarguable: when fintech brands did buy creator campaigns, they bought far worse reach than consumer brands buying on the same platform — and nobody noticed, because nobody keeps this log.
Single-brand campaigns only · YouTube paid-promotion flag + explicit disclosure · Affiliate links excluded
| Brand | Campaigns | Avg views / campaign | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Reach is the one number a brand can be held to. Every other metric in influencer marketing — engagement quality, sentiment, brand lift, attribution — is contested, self-reported, or unverifiable. Views are none of those things. YouTube publishes them, and anyone can check.
So when a fintech brand pays for hundreds of creator campaigns averaging tens of thousands of views, and a phone brand pays for a few dozen averaging two million — that is not a matter of opinion.
And it is invisible today, because no platform in India keeps a log of who sponsored whom and checks what those sponsorships reached. The agencies that placed them will not publish it. The platforms that broker them take a cut of every deal they recommend.
VidChart takes no commission on anything, from anyone. That is the only reason this page can exist.
The campaign log. VidChart scans every tracked creator's recent videos for two signals: YouTube's own paidProductPlacement flag — the legal disclosure a creator files when a video contains paid promotion — and explicit disclosure language in the title or description ("#ad", "sponsored by", "paid partnership").
Affiliate links are excluded. A tech reviewer dropping an Amazon link is not an Amazon campaign. Counting it as one would inflate every number on this page. We looked, we found it was polluting the data, and we removed it.
These counts are a floor, not a total. They reflect sponsorships that were disclosed. Undisclosed deals exist, and nobody — including us — can see them.