India's influencers still struggling four years after TikTok ban: 'It's difficult to recreate success elsewhere'

“It's difficult to replicate the success elsewhere because I don't have the same commitment on any other platform,” said Kumar, 30, from his studio in Rohtak, a short drive south of the capital New Delhi.

“It takes years to grow an audience on Instagram and especially YouTube,” he added.

Kumar was an engineer by training but gave up his white-collar job when he found an audience for his dance routines on TikTok, eventually amassing more than 1.5 million followers.

His newfound fame landed him paid opportunities to choreograph dance numbers for other influencers on the platform and music videos with Indian celebrities.

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Kumar said in his last video on the platform that he agreed with the ban and urged viewers to follow him on Instagram and YouTube.

“You must have thought carefully about it before making this decision,” he said in a brief speech to the camera. “India comes first.”

Four years later, nearly 94,000 people follow him on Instagram – a tiny fraction of his former audience – and he laments that his opportunities to make money have dried up.

“Work has stopped for us,” he said.

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TikTok came to India years after other established social media platforms but quickly became a national phenomenon.

A year before it was taken off the market, the platform said it had more than 200 million users in India – one in seven of the country's residents.

“Any influencer, any personality who wanted to build an online following had to use the platform, whether they liked it or not,” said Viraj Sheth, co-founder of influencer marketing agency Monk Entertainment.

“When we got the news of the TikTok ban, everyone was in a panic.”

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Several local tech startups tried to capitalize on TikTok's disappearance by launching their own short-video apps.

But it was the established US platforms that ultimately proved to be best placed to triumph in the new market.

In the first year after the ban, Instagram saw about six million short videos from India posted every day on Reels, its own interface that attempts to match TikTok's content model.

According to local media reports, 2.5 million videos are posted on Indian video-sharing platform Moj every day.

Market researcher Statista estimates that more than 362 million people in India use Instagram, and another 462 million use YouTube – which launched Shorts, its own TikTok rival, the same year India's ban was enacted.

According to estimates released last November by Redseer Strategy Consultants, the total audience is 250 million people across numerous homegrown video apps.

“When TikTok was banned, we all expected that there would probably be another app that would take over,” said Amiya Swarup of professional services firm EY India.

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“But you know, it’s still the Instas and the YouTube Shorts that really dominate in short videos.”

While this has been beneficial for their respective parent companies Meta and Google, Monk Entertainment's Sheth said some influencers have struggled with the transition.

TikTok's endless-scrolling interface and algorithm are known for connecting audiences with the content they want to see and boosting niche content creators, but Sheth said its competitors need a different formula for success.

“You probably didn’t have to show as much personality on TikTok,” he said. “It wasn’t that easy to reproduce on a platform like Instagram.”