India's advertising market crossed a quiet threshold in 2025. According to the FICCI-EY Media & Entertainment Report 2026, digital advertising grew to ₹94,700 crore, now the majority of the country's total ad spend, while Connected TV ad revenues climbed 42% to ₹9,900 crore. The money has moved. For most marketers, the operating model has not.

Two problems sit underneath that shift. Brands run campaigns across a sprawl of disconnected tools. And the attention they buy is still counted largely as impressions, an ad that loaded rather than an ad someone chose to watch. Meanwhile, creators wait months or years to clear monetisation thresholds, and viewers are never paid at all.

“For twenty years I watched the same transaction from the inside,” says Adris Chakraborty, co-founder of LYKSTAGE and Social Gear. “The advertiser paid, the platform cleared revenue from the first impression, and the creator and the viewer, who made the attention, were left outside the ledger. We decided to build both sides of the fix.”

LYKSTAGE: the media platform

LYKSTAGE is a creator-first, user-generated video platform built on a patented Watch-Time Monetisation Model (U.S. Patent No. 12,684,189, granted July 2026). Its unit of value is genuine watch time, not views or subscriber counts. Watch time is monetised when the ad served during viewing is watched in full.

The ads are skippable by design. When a viewer can skip and chooses not to, the completed view becomes a decision rather than a captive impression.........

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