By the numbers: India's massive digital market

With nearly 500 million internet users and roughly 530 million smartphone users, India is the second-largest online and smartphone market in the world next to China.

The bottom line: Unlike the largely saturated North American digital market, India still has room to grow.

• Roughly 40% of the country's total population is using smartphones and is accessing the internet.
• The number of internet users is expected to roughly double over the next four years, according to Cisco's latest Virtual Networking Index.

Internet adoption is driving unprecedented advertising growth in India. This is especially because internet users in India are less reluctant to pay for subscriptions and are more comfortable with paying for content via data-based ads.

• India will be the third-biggest contributor to ad spend growth globally between 2018 and 2021, according to a new report from global media agency Zenith.

Go deeper: U.S. firms look to India as next media battleground