CAC from creator collabs has tripled in two years while average sales per collab dropped 40%. The math is breaking.

Indian creator-collab CAC for D2C brands has tripled between 2024 and 2026. Average sales per collab dropped 40% in the same window. The math is broken — most influencer marketing campaigns today don't deliver positive ROI without inflating attribution windows or counting branding value that can't be measured. The correction will be brutal. Mid-tier creators who built CPM-pricing models on inflated reach data will see budgets slashed. Brands will move toward performance-driven affiliate models with creators paid on actual sales. The micro-influencer thesis survives; the mid-tier blanket-collab model doesn't.