Nilesh Deshmukh
Founder, RAD Worldwide — helping sports and entertainment IPs unlock licensing value in India and emerging markets
A few days ago, on a business development call, a category head at a mid-sized consumer brand pushed back on me with a question I keep hearing in different costumes:
"If creators are already driving a third of what India buys, why would I pour budget into a licensing program instead of just running more influencer campaigns? And honestly, where does a licensed product even fit when a creator can sell anything straight off a reel?"
It's a fair question. It's also the wrong one, and the gap between the two is the entire point of this issue.
Because here is what the numbers say: one in three Indian retail purchases will be creator-influenced by 2030, and licensed products are barely in the conversation. The pipes that carry creator commerce are built and converting. The licensed catalogue that should be flowing through them isn't. That's not a demand problem. It's an infrastructure problem. Let's get into it.
Creator-influenced retail spend in India is projected to rise from $240 billion in 2025 to $600 billion by 2030, with one in three purchases being creator-influenced. Licensed products represent a negligible share of that commerce. The infrastructure exists; the licensed product catalogue doesn't.
Topic Explained: The Creator Commerce Gap
For the better part of a decade, the licensing business in India has optimised for the retail shelf: licensor to licensee to distributor to a marketplace listing. Meanwhile, commerce itself quietly relocated. It now lives inside the creator feed: the reel, the live stream, the shoppable video, the WhatsApp drop. The discovery-to-purchase funnel that used to take days now collapses into a single scroll.
The licensing industry hasn't moved with it. We have a commerce pipeline built for creators and a licensed catalogue still built for shelves. This issue breaks down exactly where that disconnect sits, and what it would take to close it.
1. Creator-Influenced Retail Spend: $240B → $600B by 2030
The headline number comes from the Google–Deloitte report "The $250 Billion Commerce Frontier" (April 2026), and it is not a soft projection.
Creator-influenced retail spend rises from $240B in 2025 (~20% of total retail) to $600B by 2030 (~30% of retail).
One in three retail purchases in India will be creator-influenced by 2030, up from one in five today.
Creators are expected to pull 50–60 million new Tier 2+ shoppers into digital commerce.
By 2030, roughly $25 billion (9–11% of India's e-commerce GMV) will transact through creator-owned micro-stores and shoppable videos. Creators increasingly operate as mini-storefronts in their own right.
Live commerce alone is projected to scale to a $7–8 billion market by 2030.
The creator base itself tripled in four years: from ~0.9–1 million creators in 2020 to 3.5–4.5 million in 2025.
For context, BCG's "From Content to Commerce" report frames the broader number even larger, at $350–400B of creator-influenced spending today, crossing $1 trillion by 2030, depending on how widely you draw the influence boundary. Either lens points in the same direction: this is now the centre of Indian commerce, not the margin.
The takeaway for licensing: the channel that will carry a third of Indian retail is being built right now. The question is whether a licensed product is being built to ride it.
2. Product Discovery and Purchase Intent via Creator Content
Reach was never the interesting part. Conversion is. And the conversion data is where the licensing opportunity becomes undeniable.
28% of Indian shoppers now discover new products through creators.
63% trust influencers for product information and recommendations.
77% of Tier 1 and Tier 2 shoppers have made an impulse purchase based on creator content, proof that creators now shape the buy, not just the awareness.
Viewers who engage with shoppable videos show a 9x increase in purchase intent.
Google and YouTube appear in 87% of journeys where Indian consumers said they discovered a new brand, product, or retailer.
Put these together, and the licensing implication is sharp. Licensed products live or die on impulse and emotional connection: a character you love, a team you support, a show you can't stop watching. The creator feed is the single highest-converting impulse surface ever built in India. It is, structurally, the perfect home for a licensed product. And it is almost empty of it.
3. Where Licensed Products Currently Sit in the Creator Commerce Journey
Honestly? Nowhere useful.
Walk the creator commerce journey today, and you'll find four things selling well:
Creator-owned merch (Bhuvan Bam's Youthiapa, BeYouNick's KRA)
Brand collaborations and sponsorships
Affiliate hauls and shoppable listings
Creator-founded D2C labels
What you will not find, at any meaningful scale, is licensed product: character IP, sports merchandise, entertainment franchises, and brand extensions, sold through the creator. Licensed goods still flow through the legacy path: licensor → licensee → distributor → a marketplace listing or a retail shelf. That path was designed for a world where discovery happened in-store or in a banner ad.
So the picture is this:
Licensed product is present in Indian commerce, but parked on the lowest-converting surfaces (catalogue listings, big-box shelves).
Licensed product is absent from the highest-converting surface: the creator feed, the live stream, the micro-store.
The commerce pipeline is there. The licensed catalogue formatted to fill it isn't. That single sentence is the whole opportunity.
4. Building Creator-First Licensed Product Pipelines
Closing the gap isn't about convincing creators to sell. They already sell better than anyone. It's about building four pieces of missing infrastructure so licensed products can actually move the way creator commerce moves.
Catalogue built for creator surfaces, not shelves. Licensed SKUs designed as drops and limited editions: shoppable-tagged, affiliate-ready, and packaged for a reel or a live stream, not a 40-product PDP grid. Scarcity and timing are native to how creators sell; the licensed catalogue has to speak that language.
Creator-friendly rights frameworks. Today, putting licensed IP in a creator's hands usually means a bespoke, lawyer-heavy deal per partnership. That doesn't scale to 4 million creators. The unlock is programmatic / affiliate-style licensing: pre-cleared rights that let a vetted creator feature and sell approved licensed products without re-negotiating from zero each time.
IP-to-creator matching. A cricket creator should be selling sports IP. A gaming or anime creator should be moving character IP. A regional comedy creator should be carrying a regional-language franchise product. Right now, there is no engine doing this matchmaking at scale. It's the missing layer between the licensor's catalogue and the creator's audience.
Speed-and-scale fulfilment and royalty tracking. Print-on-demand, micro-store integration, and royalty reporting that operates at creator-commerce velocity, so a drop can go from a creator's reel to a fan's doorstep with the licensor paid cleanly and automatically.
Build these four, and the licensed product stops being a shelf category and becomes a creator-commerce category. That's the entire thesis.
5. Tier 2 & 3 India: Messaging-Led Shopping and Regional Language as the Licensing Unlock
If the creator feed is the opportunity, Bharat is where it compounds, and where it's most invisible to licensors planning from a metro boardroom.
Tier 2+ India already has ~480 million online video and social media users, but roughly 300 million of them have never bought online. Creators are the trust bridge that converts them.
Messaging-led shopping (WhatsApp and similar) in Tier 2+ India sees click-through rates of 45–60%, numbers that no metro funnel comes close to.
45% of consumers buy via content in their native language, and 84% find regional-language content more relatable.
~80% of creators on ShareChat and Moj come from non-metro India.
Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities post the highest engagement rates (4.5–5.5%) at the lowest campaign costs (₹35K–₹90K), the best conversion economics in the country.
Here's the licensing unlock that almost nobody is acting on: regional IP + regional-language creators + vernacular content + messaging commerce. Licensed product, localised into regional languages and pushed through micro-influencers over WhatsApp, sits at the intersection of the cheapest reach, the highest trust, and the highest click-through in India, and it is the single most under-built surface in the entire licensing market.
The metro creator feed is the obvious opportunity. The regional, messaging-led, vernacular surface is the contrarian one, and that's usually where the margin lives.
RAD Opinion
When 28% of Indian shoppers discover new products through creators and 77% make impulse purchases based on creator content, the question isn't whether creators can sell licensed products. It's why nobody has built the infrastructure to let them.
The commerce pipeline is there. The licensed product catalogue to fill it isn't. Whoever builds that catalogue (and the rights, matching, and fulfilment rails around it) first owns the next decade of Indian licensing.
Warner Bros. Discovery makes India a priority licensing engine
Warner Bros. Discovery's global consumer products arm has repositioned India from an emerging territory to one of its priority global growth markets, per its South Asia leadership. The bigger signal is the category shift: India's licensing business is moving beyond graphic apparel and youth merch into high-value, cross-category deals spanning mobility, alcobev, consumer technology, jewellery, FMCG, and experiential retail. The market is maturing in precisely the direction that makes a creator-first catalogue viable.
playR scales up in sports merchandise
playR is emerging as a serious force in India's sports merchandise market, betting on the country's deep fan culture across cricket and beyond. As fandom turns into a year-round commerce category, not just a match-day one, it's a signal that sports licensing in India is finally maturing past one-off jersey deals.
Purpose & Craft: The Product-Shaped IP Nobody's Licensing
Entertainment creators get the attention, but the strongest licensing logic often sits with "purpose" creators (cooking, art, craft) for one structural reason: the content already is a product. A recipe maps to a spice kit, cookware, or a cookbook. An illustration maps to printed goods. A craft maps to the physical object itself. The leap from content to licensed catalogue is far shorter here than it is for a comedian or a gamer, yet almost no one is building it.
Village Cooking Channel (VCC), Tamil Nadu
Not a recipe channel. A world. ~30 million subscribers, 9.3 billion views, the first Tamil channel to win YouTube's Diamond Creator Award, with multiple videos past 100 million views. The recurring family led by grandfather Chinna Veeramangalam, the open-field setting, clay pots and firewood, the signature calm, all of it is ownable, recognisable IP. Extends naturally into cookware and clay-pot lines, regional spice/masala brands, cookbooks, packaged "village-style" foods, and even experiential tourism. A large international audience means the IP travels. The single most under-monetised food IP in the country.
Kabita's Kitchen (Kabita Singh)
~13.5M+ subscribers built on simple, no-fail, everyday-ingredient recipes. The asset is trusted by the mainstream Indian home cook, which converts cleanly into branded kitchen tools, masala and ready-mix kits, and a cookbook.
The regional food wildcard
Veg Village Food (~6.5M), and Kerala names like Firoz Chuttipara and Shamees Kitchen (~5.7M) reach exactly the Tier 2/3, vernacular audience, this issue flagged as the unlock, and not one of them has a product line yet. Traditional art forms turned creator brands (Madhubani, Pattachitra) sit in the same white space: huge product-shaped IP, near-zero creator-led licensing built around it. That's not a gap in the search. It's the opportunity.
Working through this in your own market?
RAD Worldwide works with sports franchises, global IP holders, and entertainment brands, building licensing strategies in India and emerging markets. If the numbers aren't matching the opportunity, that's usually the right moment for a conversation — not another round of internal planning.
We're taking on new briefs for Q3. We deliberately keep the client list small.
If this issue was useful, the next one will be too. Licensing Radar lands every week — one signal worth your time, written by someone operating in this market.
