A woman named Lil Miquela posts on Instagram, works with high-end fashion brands, and puts out music. She makes about ₹80–90 crore a year. She looks good, has her own style, and has an opinion about culture. She’s also not real. In no way, shape, or form. She was made from 3D models, is maintained by a small team in Los Angeles, and is used with an accuracy that a real person could not even reach on their best day.
It’s hard not to notice how lightly this is taken in the marketing world. Virtual influencers were new and interesting a few years ago. They were only used at tech conferences and in think pieces. Now, brands in fashion, beauty, games, and even finance are making deals with fake people who don’t have birth certificates or bad press. Once you think about it, the reasoning isn’t hard to understand. A fake influencer never shows up to a campaign drunk. She never says something bad that gets caught. She doesn’t negotiate contracts with a difficult publicist or raise her prices all of a sudden after a viral video.
Take Lu do Magalu as an example. She is said to make between 20 and 22 crore rupees a year and is one of the highest-paid virtual influencers in the world. A Brazilian store made her and has used her as their brand face for years. She is consistent, happy, and always on message. Lu saves money by being efficient instead of hiring a real spokesperson, which would have cost a lot in time, money, and management fees. The fact that it works so well is almost scary.
At every level, brands pay these digital people. It’s possible for a top virtual influencer to get 10 to 30 lakh rupees per sponsored post. People who are in the middle level of AI (with a few hundred thousand followers and a clear niche) usually make between 2 and 8 lakh rupees per post. Micro-AI influencers, who are newer and are still building their followings, are making ₹20,000 to ₹1.5 lakh per placement. Numbers that, in many markets, are right up there with what real-life creators charge.
There has been less noise but steady adoption in India. Brands use AI influencers for performance marketing campaigns, app onboarding videos, and product explainers that can be made in more than one language. Part of the appeal is that one virtual character can be localized, dubbed, and reskinned for audiences in different parts of the world without having to book flights or set up shoots. It’s still not clear to Indian audiences whether they can tell the difference between a fake and a real persona, but for now, that lack of clarity seems to help brands.
These virtual characters make money in more ways than just sponsored posts. Affiliate marketing, subscription-based platforms, and licensing intellectual property are all big ways to make money. Virtual influencers really do better than humans when it comes to licensing. A company can buy the rights to use an AI character in ads, apps, websites, and metaverse experiences. The price of these deals ranges from ₹8 lakh to ₹80 lakh, depending on the length and scope of the deal. In the same way, you can’t license a person. There’s something almost poetic about the idea that intellectual property will last longer than a person.
This change may show more than anything else how much influencer culture has always been about how someone performs rather than how they are. Audiences care about things that can be engineered, like style, consistency, and relatability. When they’re built right, virtual influencers do all of those things without any changes. The ones that do best aren’t very different from human creators who do well: they post a lot, use short videos, and tell stories that people can relate to. They have just taken out the unpredictable part of people.
That might be progress or something you should be a little wary of, depending on who you ask. It’s getting harder and harder for brands to argue with the ROI math. It’s a whole different conversation for real creators who see their digital personas spend campaign funds that they used to compete for. And for the people who see it—scrolling past a perfectly lit virtual face, liking the post, and maybe even buying the product—they may not have even thought about it.
