How the TikTok Ban in India is Impacting the Influencer Marketing Space

After a geopolitical dispute with China in 2023, TikTok was banned entirely in India, citing a law that allows the government to block websites and apps in the interest of the country’s ‘sovereignty and integrity’.

TikTok was not the only Chinese app banned in India. 59 Chinese apps were banned in total in 2020 including WeChat, Weibo, and QQ. But having taken off worldwide during the pandemic, TikTok had amassed almost 200 million users in India at the time of the ban and considered the country its biggest market outside of the US.

Almost three years later, brands and creators have become increasingly aware of the success they can drive through TikTok, and agencies are shaping entire strategies around the app. This opportunity has been stripped away from brands and creators in India.

To learn more about the effect India’s TikTok ban has had on the progression of the influencer marketing industry in the country, we reached out to affable.ai, an end-to-end influencer marketing platform with strong roots in the APAC region, to gain a greater understanding of the challenges that India has been faced with, and how they are being overcome.

Accepting the ban

Pooja ParasuRaman, Marketing Director at affable.ai, clarified that India’s TikTok ban is extremely strict, and the app is not available to anyone in the country. We were intrigued to know whether this came as a shock to those present in the digital space in the region, and Pooja clarified that it did.

“TikTok as a platform had gained a lot of popularity in India with over 200 million monthly active users by 2020, which was also counted as South Asia’s largest market for the platform.