Article · About a 7 minute read

The Facebook ARPU Explained

Gennaro Cuofano · FourWeekMBA Free Beginner

This lays out Meta's actual advertising revenue per user, and the regional split is the reality check most founders skip: even the most efficient ad business on earth earns roughly 68 dollars per user a year in the US and Canada but only about 4 to 5 dollars in the rest of the world. If your audience is largely in India or other lower ARPU regions, the per-user math on ads is brutal, and this gives you the numbers to run it yourself. Treat it as a sanity check on how many users an ad model would actually need.

• Meta's worldwide ad revenue per user runs in the low tens of dollars a year, with US and Canada near 68 dollars and Rest of World around 4 to 5 dollars.
• Those gaps mean the same product needs far more users to earn the same ad revenue when the audience sits outside high spending regions.
• If a user is worth a few dollars a year in ads, you can back into the traffic you would need, and often it is much larger than a subscription would require.