Nikhil Sharma emerges as the most popular content creator: Forbes and INCA's India's Top 100 Digital Stars list

Nikhil Sharma, also known as “Mumbiker Nikhil, is the most popular content creator, as per the list of India’s Top 100 Digital Stars announced by Forbes India and INCA, GroupM’s content marketing arm.

Sharma is followed by Abhishek Upmanyu and Komal Pandey.

The list ranks content creators across nine categories—comedy, beauty, fashion, business and finance, fitness, food, tech, travel and social work, who have been recognised for their innovative and engaging content through the list.

In terms of engagement, Natasha Noel is on top, whereas Ashish Chanchlani has the highest followers. These digital stars, make high-quality content and demonstrate high-performance standards across average views, engagement, impressions and reach.

The average engagement rate of the 100 creators on the list is 5.89% and the average INCA Score is 8.39/10. Comedy creators top the list, followed very closely by beauty and fashion; together they dominate 40% of the list.

Men and women contribute equally to the list, close to 50:50, and there are two transgender individuals.

Content creation, as a profession is trending right now, but it can also be extremely fickle, and creativity, consistency and hard work are key to success. This list identifies stories of many such creators who worked their way to the top—from posting “outfits of the day” on social media, and editing their own videos, to now getting over a million followers across platforms, lots of engagement, and working with some of the biggest brands.

"These creators go beyond personalities who influence an audience; it’s often their content, in the shape of videos, reels, graphics, blogs et al, that engages audiences and, in some cases, is able to make a difference. This special issue is the result of that Forbes India-INCA project of epic proportions,” said Brian Carvalho, Editor, Forbes India.

To arrive at the list, INCA first identified the top 20 creators from all the 10 genres mentioned, keeping engagement rate and follower count in mind. From this pool of 200 creators, they shortlisted the top 100 basis multiple metrics: Reach, engagement, impressions, genuity, follower count and trending score.

These numbers were fed into INCA’s proprietary algorithm INscore, which is a relative score between similar creators in the entire creator universe. INscore groups creators by channel, type and size, and then ranks their content by engagement rate. The best content gets 10 and the worst gets 1. The platforms taken into consideration were: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and in some cases Twitter.

Kunal Sawant, Business Head, INCA India, GroupM, said, “Influencers have gone beyond just content creation, they are now becoming a brand in themselves. They do more than just creating awareness about a brand. They impact the mid and bottom of the funnel metrics, which include leads and conversion. This list is our effort to help marketers understand various aspects and names in the influencer marketing industry in the country and provide them with a curated list when talking about top influencers from different categories. To arrive to the list, we used INCAs proprietary algorithm “INscore” and we are thrilled to announce the launch of this list with Forbes India.”

To get access to the final list, viewers can click here: https://www.forbesindia.com/lists/digital-stars.