“It is difficult to recreate the success elsewhere, because I haven’t got the same engagement 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 on YouTube,” he added.
Kumar was an engineer by training but ditched white collar work when he found an audience for his dance routines on TikTok, eventually garnering more than 1.5 million followers.
His new-found celebrity netted him paid opportunities to choreograph dance numbers for other influencers on the platform and music videos featuring Indian celebrities.
US Senate passes bill to force ByteDance to sell TikTok or face ban of the app
US Senate passes bill to force ByteDance to sell TikTok or face ban of the app
Kumar said in his final video on the platform that he agreed with the ban, urging those watching to follow him over to Instagram and YouTube.
“They must have thought thoroughly before making this decision,” he said in a short speech to camera. “India comes first.”
Four years later, just under 94,000 people follow him on Instagram – a tiny fraction of his earlier audience – and he laments that his chances to make money have dried up.
“For us, the work stopped,” he said.
02:15
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Singaporeans fume over US lawmaker grilling of TikTok CEO
TikTok arrived in India years after other established social media platforms, but quickly became a national phenomenon.
A year before it was kicked out of the market, the platform said it had more than 200 million users in India – one out of every seven people in the country.
“Every influencer, every personality trying to build an online following had to tap into the platform whether or not they liked it,” said Viraj Sheth, co-founder of influencer marketing agency Monk Entertainment.
“As soon as we got the news of TikTok getting banned, everyone was helter-skelter.”
These places have already banned TikTok
These places have already banned TikTok
Several local tech start-ups attempted to capitalise on TikTok’s disappearance by rushing their own short-form video apps to market.
But it was established US platforms that eventually proved best primed to triumph in the new market.
In the first year after the ban, Instagram saw about six million short videos from India posted each day to Reels, its own interface attempting to match TikTok’s content model.
That compared to 2.5 million videos posted each day to Indian video sharing platform Moj, according to local media reports.
Market tracker Statista estimates that more than 362 million people in India use Instagram and 462 million more use YouTube – which rolled out Shorts, its own TikTok rival, the same year as the India ban.
That compares to a total audience of 250 million people across manifold home-grown video apps, according to estimates by Redseer Strategy Consultants published last November.
“When TikTok was banned, we were all expecting that there will probably be some other app which will come and take over,” said Amiya Swarup of professional services firm EY India.
‘Deleted forever’: TikTok influencers say US ban will destroy careers
‘Deleted forever’: TikTok influencers say US ban will destroy careers
“But you know, it’s still the Instas and the YouTube Shorts which are still really ruling in terms of short-form videos.”
While that had been beneficial for their respective parent companies Meta and Google, Sheth of Monk Entertainment said some influencers had struggled to make the transition.
TikTok’s endless-scroll interface and algorithm are renowned for both matching audiences with the content they want to see and boosting niche content creators, but Sheth said its rivals require a different formula for success.
“You probably didn’t need to show personality on TikTok as much,” he said. “On a platform like Instagram, that’s not something that replicated that well.”