Why India remains Meta’s most important unfinished market

Meta’s global growth story increasingly runs through India. The irony is that India also remains one of the company’s weakest monetisation markets on a per-user basis. This contradiction sits at the heart of Meta’s India strategy in 2026.

Even as user growth slows in mature Western markets and regulators continue circling Big Tech with varying levels of enthusiasm and competence, India remains Meta’s largest reservoir of attention, engagement, and future internet users. The company’s family of apps now reaches over a billion users in India across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta AI’s largest usage market is also India.

Meanwhile, Meta India’s gross advertising revenue grew 29% year-on-year to Rs 29,392 crore in FY25, significantly outpacing Google India’s 11% growth during the same period. In other words, India may still be a relatively low-ARPU market compared to the United States or Europe, but it is no longer a low-value one.

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“Meta’s platforms offer something no Indian alternative currently matches be it vernacular reach at scale, granular targeting or an SMB penetration that extends well beyond metros into markets that traditional media never efficiently served,” veteran marketer Shubhranshu Singh told e4m, adding, “For most brands, Facebook and Instagram are the default, because that’s where the audience is with measurable intent and acceptable cost.”

That “acceptable cost” part matters.

India’s digital advertising market is still significantly cheaper than mature global markets, particularly on Meta’s platforms. According to Rahul Vengalil, co-founder and CEO of tgthr, India remains one of the cheapest major advertising markets globally in terms of CPMs.

“It's hard to imagine how low India's ARPU is. And we are among the cheapest ever when it comes to CPMs,” Vengalil said, adding that despite India’s enormous user base, the country still represents a relatively small advertising market globally in terms of absolute spends.

Yet advertisers continue pouring money into Meta’s platforms because few rivals currently match its combination of scale, targeting depth and behavioural ubiquity in India. Together, Google and Meta continue dominating India’s digital advertising economy, but Meta’s hold over social behaviour and discovery remains especially difficult to replicate.

As Singh argued, Meta’s dominance is reinforced as much by the absence of equivalent alternatives as by the company’s own strengths. “Meta isn’t winning India’s ad market,” he said. “India simply hasn’t built a credible reason to leave.”

That dependence has quietly become one of the defining characteristics of India’s digital advertising ecosystem. Over the past decade, Meta’s platforms have effectively become part utility, part infrastructure, part cultural operating system.

India’s internet generation did not merely adopt Meta’s platforms. In many ways, it learned the internet through them.

“There is a tendency to look at markets only through the lens of what they monetise today,” said Venugopal Ganganna, Co-founder and CIO, LS Digital. “What Meta has in India goes beyond monetisation.”

Ganganna pointed out that Facebook and WhatsApp became foundational digital behaviours for hundreds of millions of Indian users long before India’s advertising ecosystem fully matured.

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“People use Instagram the way an earlier generation used television,” he said. “These platforms are deeply embedded in everyday life.” That behavioural depth is now translating into increasingly sticky commercial infrastructure as well.

At Medusa Beverages, VP-Marketing Gaurav Sehgal said Meta’s importance lies not merely in user scale, but in how seamlessly its ecosystem spills across daily digital behaviour.

“A campaign we run on Instagram does not stay on Instagram,” Sehgal said. “It travels into WhatsApp conversations, gets screenshotted, shared in groups, discussed.”

For advertisers, Meta’s real strength increasingly lies in this interconnectedness. Facebook may not command the cultural dominance it once did among younger audiences, but Instagram, Reels and WhatsApp together continue forming one of the most deeply integrated digital ecosystems in India.

That also partly explains why Meta continues betting aggressively on India despite lower monetisation levels.

Vengalil believes India’s economics could improve naturally over time as user growth begins slowing and advertising inventory tightens. “So far we were in a growth phase,” he said. “But once the number of users reaches saturation, inventory crunch will happen.”

The logic is straightforward. As growth stabilises, advertisers begin competing more aggressively for the same users. CPMs rise. ARPU improves. India slowly transitions from a pure scale market into a stronger yield market.

Meta is already seeing early signs of that shift. The company’s India advertising growth is now outpacing Google’s, while AI-driven campaign tools are lowering the barrier for smaller businesses to begin advertising online.

Why Meta is finally overtaking Google in ad revenues. Read on 

According to Vengalil, AI-generated creatives and automated campaign optimisation could dramatically expand Meta’s long-tail advertiser base in India, particularly among SMBs, restaurants, local retailers and smaller businesses that previously lacked the resources to work with agencies or build sophisticated campaigns.

“Their annual budgets may be minuscule compared to large players,” he said. “But the volume becomes so high that it makes up for it.”

That long-tail opportunity is critical in a market like India, which still has tens of millions of small businesses operating with limited digital sophistication. Industry estimates suggest only around five million of India’s roughly 63 million SMBs are meaningfully online today, leaving substantial room for future monetisation growth.

At the same time, cracks are beginning to emerge in the broader social advertising model itself.

Shubhangi Gupta, Co-founder and CMO of SportVot, believes the industry has become overly dependent on standardised programmatic advertising and passive engagement metrics. “Consumers today are highly exposed to repetitive ad formats across platforms,” Gupta said. “Reach alone is no longer enough.”

She argued that brands increasingly need to move beyond pure scale and invest in more focused communities, creator ecosystems and interest-led engagement.

“Partnerships within grassroots sports, regional communities, or focused creator ecosystems often build much stronger brand recall and affinity than a generic high-impression campaign,” Gupta added.

That shift may ultimately become one of Meta’s biggest long-term challenges in India. The company still dominates digital attention at massive scale, but younger audiences are fragmenting faster, communities are becoming more niche, and creators increasingly behave like independent media ecosystems rather than mere distribution channels.

Even so, few marketers appear willing to bet against Meta’s India position anytime soon.

The larger concern, according to Singh, is not whether Meta can eventually monetise India more effectively. It is whether India is receiving proportional value in return for sustaining Big Tech’s next growth cycle.

“The more uncomfortable truth is that the biggest opportunity Meta is sitting on in India is arbitrage between what Indian attention is worth globally and what Meta currently pays for it in infrastructure, creator economics, and platform accountability,” Singh said.

“The ARPU gap isn’t a market maturity problem but more a structural choice that works as long as regulators stay quiet and advertisers stay dependent.”

India, in many ways, now keeps Meta’s global growth narrative credible. The real question may no longer be whether Meta can monetise India. It may be what India ultimately gets in return.

Meta had not responded to queries from e4m at the time of publishing.