Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

139 pointsposted 2 days ago
by zdw
(businessinsider.com)

96 Comments

redsymbol

2 days ago

I'm a software engineer who is also a media buyer, which is the term for someone who purchases and configures advertising campaigns. I have spent over $100k of my own funds on Meta ads the past several years, which makes me moderately experienced. I spend a lot of time in the "ad manager", i.e. the webapp that Meta has for configuring these ads, allocating budget, and so on.

I think the current UX of the ad manager will make Meta the target of a class action lawsuit, and there is nothing they can do to avoid that now.

Why: many aspects of the ad manager UI will activate settings that had previously been disabled. The details vary over time, but right now three specific examples come to mind:

1. Promo codes 2. Site links 3. Related media

I won't explain these here (you can ask a media buyer and/or an llm). But these are features of Meta's ad system that are useful in certain situations, but for many types of ads, it is better to disable them.

The problem: If you disable them, and then edit the ad creative (i.e. change the image or video), in many contexts they are silently re-enabled.

This is not noticeable unless you navigate through the complex web interface to check, and disable them again. I now have a detailed checklist, but before that, I would often find I had activated ads with these accidentally active.

The outcome is to increase the cost of the intended result of the ad campaign. In other words, it makes the ads more expensive.

It has certainly caused many media buyers to spend significantly more than they otherwise would to get the same results from their ad campaigns.

These three specific examples have been happening for many months, maybe all of 2025. If they disabled the auto-enable right now, that is still a potentially massive amount of ad spend which has been wasted by many companies around the world.

That is why I say a class action lawsuit is inevitable at this point. There is simply too much money on the table for that not to happen.

Why did this happen? My best guess is poorly thought out internal incentives. I.e., someone in some layer of management has their compensation tied to the percentage of running ads with site links activated, for example. So that person(s) is forcing the design/engineering teams to implement a UX that inflates those metrics. That is the best explanation I can imagine for what I am seeing.

neom

2 days ago

I recently had to charge back $20k of ads because meta said no, in spite of the fact that a support person went on a webex with me, did a screenshare and saw that their ads dashboard is so totally broken that these mystical ads that ran are nowhere to be found, I mean maybe buried in the pages that would literally fail to load half the content, then producing internal app modals spewing incomprehensible errors, buttons that lead to nothing, and don't get me started on if someone happens to start an ad-hoc campaign in IG directly. LinkedIn are the only platform with a half decent ads manager, X is well built but I trust the results from it near zero.

redsymbol

2 days ago

It's an interesting situation. I think that despite the issues, Meta is the best (and fastest-learning) platform for mass-market purchase conversions. Linkedin has powerful targeting options, but the fact that it's tied to GMT drives me nuts. For LI, typically I use manual bids so I can easily dial down delivery at off times (e.g. if the ad objective is booking a sales call).

All in all, these ad platforms are tremendously complex software systems, and as someone who has been a fulltime software engineer I have a lot of sympathy. But with so much money is on the line, the standards are high.

neom

a day ago

I agree with you. I think meta is fine if you have a very very clear value prop to a very very clear ICP that is already repeatably converting and is generally b2c in nature. If you are trying to do anything specialized or b2b message testing on meta, I find their algo really expensive, maybe I'm just shitty at targeting or don't use the platform well but hiring a task rabbit to stand outside a conference or event and hand out fliers seems to be cheaper and higher preforming than anything I've gotten out of meta, and I can still do it from my basement.

These platforms are quite complex, but I feel they are more complex than they need to be, using them, they really feel like they were built out of hybrid consulting discovery to enterprise, with a result that doesn't translate down well to SMB.

charintstr

2 days ago

Having experience inside Metas culture, it is extremely metrics driven, sometimes without regard to side effects of optimizing a primary goal. So if someone was measuring their job performance on optimizing site-links then it’s very likely this could be happening.

bradlys

a day ago

A lot of people are also assuming intentional malice here when incompetence/lack-of-care is the main issue.

If people saw how things are done at Meta, you wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of the stuff is functionally broken due to a lack of care from the top level. Your VPs and above just do not give a shit about quality whatsoever. This thing fucking prints money like crazy. Also, preventing loss of revenue and/or customer satisfaction is not a top level priority.

I think people also don’t understand how much bigger companies spend. They absolutely dwarf all the smaller businesses out there and Meta doesn’t have a ton of interest in spending time on customers who are just as likely to go out of business next year as they are to increase their budget a tiny bit.

And the top businesses have a completely different flow. These guys are spending hundreds of millions to billions - not a 100k over several years lol.

jfil

14 hours ago

No, Meta doesn't get a pass on this one after "Jedi Blue" and faking video viewing metrics. These guys are criminals.

Generally, media buyers/advertisers are clueless when it comes to ad fraud. The big platforms have made a lot of money by abusing this fact. (I have over 15 years of experience in online marketing, on the advertiser, publisher and ad-network side. )

blargey

a day ago

Lack of care is malice, though. Hanlon's razor only applies if they would aspire to do better but lack the awareness/capability, not if they'd happily accept the tradeoff.

singleshot_

20 hours ago

> Lack of care is malice

These words have pretty specific meanings and this ain’t it.

algo_trader

2 days ago

can you spare 5 minutes for a quick email/chat about bidding/campaigns?

its rare to find a technically proficient media buyer ;/

(I am not a FB employee or a lawyer.. ) I will send you a DM on twitter

redsymbol

2 days ago

Sure, happy to chat. @redsymbol on twitter, or my email is in my HN about page

clove

a day ago

How are you profiting from this?

immibis

2 days ago

Why class action? Sounds like you think you could sue individually. I'm not convinced, but you are.

toss1

2 days ago

A major benefit of a class action, especially for complex cases, is that the costs of prosecuting the lawsuit are spread over many plaintiffs. Pursuing an individual lawsuit in federal court can cost well into six figures, which is not a good bet if your potential recovery as a single plaintiff is in the same range. And that is assuming the large corp you are suing doesn't do the usual tactic of burying you in papers, spurious motions, and every trick in the book to run up your costs in money and time.

Class actions bundle those costs for 'all plaintiffs who are similarly situated' and the judgements are also for all plaintiffs at once, so class actions are where large companies can be properly stung.

This is also why so many companies put clauses in their contracts that you agree to forego any possibility of participating in a class action.

So, if you are subject to a systematic malfeasance by a company, the best route is a class action; they've already got it setup that you'll almost certainly fail trying an individual action, unless you have very deep pockets and close to a decade of free time.

DannyBee

2 days ago

This savings is mostly for lawyers, since almost any of these cases would be taken on contingency. You are not paying up front.

It therefore mostly affects case valuation

toss1

20 hours ago

Contingency is not always an option.

Of course attorneys can take on individual cases on contingency and make viable a case where the plaintiff lacks the spare six-figures of costs to even start the case.

That does NOT mean there is no effect beyond "case valuation".

Attorneys cannot simply take every case on contingency, and when the [potential reward]/[cost] ratio is not sufficient, the attorney must pass, and no suit will be filed.

Class Action literally makes it POSSIBLE

This is especially true where small-dollar harms are being done, but at scale of millions, where ripping off consumers is systematic, or where harms such as pollution affected many.

DannyBee

10 hours ago

"This is especially true where small-dollar harms are being done, but at scale of millions, where ripping off consumers is systematic, or where harms such as pollution affected many."

All of these particular things seem exactly like the job of a state AG, or other form of regulator, vs private lawyers.

Political dysfunction aside, of course.

I'd personally rather the state AG and various consumer-friendly regulators of, say, california, have the billions of dollars going to the class action attorneys in that state.

Remember that class actions were not created to enable any of the things you cite. They were judiciary-created as a means of simple judicial efficiency (and requiring all affected plaintiffs to be grouped together). As such, outside of "they were there", it's not obvious why they are a particularly good way to solve the problems you give.

In case you think i'm particularly anti-consumer, i actually think LLC's should not exist and shareholders should be responsible for harms again. Which would likely obviate a lot of the practices class actions were suing over in the first place.

chuckadams

2 days ago

> Three advertisers also said they'd encountered a problem where Meta automatically switched those toggles to "on," even when they'd explicitly turned them off — meaning they inadvertently spent their budgets on AI-generated ads they didn't intend to run.

Goodness, such uncharacteristic behavior for Facebook apps :-|

x0x0

2 days ago

We tried these AI-produced ads. They produced gibberish. Random mutations of our existing ads with nonsensical words and the desired actions just permutated.

Terr_

2 days ago

One of the enshittification patterns: Abuse the middleman formerly applied just one side eventually gets applied to the other as well.

rchaud

2 days ago

Used to be that only the consumer was exploited this way. Manually turn off notifications and permissions in an app, only to have them turned back on after an app update. This is why I block app updates across the board. My bank app will tell me when i need to update to continue using it, and that's good enough for me. Most app updates tend to make the experience worse these days.

Terr_

2 days ago

Yeah, as much as some software updates need to be automatic for security reasons, others need to be opt-in because the publisher can't be trusted.

Not just in the sense of downgrading the software, but also when the publisher—sometimes under new management—decides to add things that invade your privacy or are straight-up malware.

hapticmonkey

a day ago

It’s the third stage in the process. First the platform is good to users. Then it’s bad to users but good to business customers. Third, and finally, it’s bad to both users and business customers. Now it’s only the shareholders that are winning.

naet

2 days ago

I'm a big fan of podcasts; this year I've heard multiple podcasts that I listen to say that the bottom fell out of podcast ad sponsorship money and they lost a lot of funding. Many were looking for alternative ways to fund their podcasts like selling monthly subscriptions.

I wonder if the ad market will start to drop out for other stuff like websites too. AI might cannibalize search engine traffic... if google can basically scrape your site and then front-run you in the search results with an AI summary, you might not be able to make some money off the content you produce with online ads. Some will say good riddance to the SEO spam type of websites that are stuffed with horrible ads, but there are also people making legitimately good or well intentioned content that live off ad spend. I know I personally enjoy reading certain web comics that seem to be largely funded with online ads. I certainly don't like ads, but sometimes I'd rather see something for free with an ad instead of paying for it.

--

On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad it's completely pointless. Someone out there is getting screwed on their ad spend. I think a lot of companies are probably losing money on bad metrics reported for ad views, ads shown to the wrong audience, fake clicks, etc. I'm not saying ads are completely worthless or can't drive sales and conversions but I do think it's easy to get fooled into thinking they are doing more than they are.

gs17

2 days ago

> On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad it's completely pointless.

I get a lot of these for elections which already took place... in places I don't even live. It seems like these are mistakes on the part of the people placing the ads, it's hard to imagine they're seeing the view metrics from after the event and deciding to keep spending.

randycupertino

2 days ago

> I'm a big fan of podcasts; this year I've heard multiple podcasts that I listen to say that the bottom fell out of podcast ad sponsorship money and they lost a lot of funding. Many were looking for alternative ways to fund their podcasts like selling monthly subscriptions.

This has happened to a bunch of youtubers I follow recently as well! They mentioned youtube funding all but dried up as advertising dollars moved to more short-form content. I've heard maybe 5-8 of them mention it.

cortesoft

2 days ago

Seems like your description of what is happening would HELP podcast ad revenue, though? If web sites are no longer a good source of eyeballs (since people are just getting their info from AI summaries and aren't visiting web site), wouldn't that shift MORE ad spend to podcasts, where you will be more likely to reach an audience?

redsymbol

2 days ago

> I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago

As someone who buys ads on IG: this is almost certainly because the advertiser has misconfigured their settings for that ad campaign.

chistev

2 days ago

Why are podcasts being affected?

nyrikki

2 days ago

Much of the podcast problems were due to Honey leaking any promo code to the world, including employee discounts and customer specific discounts.

When Intuit is scraping every browser tab, there is no way to link a podcast campaign with engagement, so the way they were paid for driving traffic is lost.

Basically Honey copied the Ashley Madison model, unconstrained addition with a pay for delete. Ashley Madison had no email verification fyi, any bot or angry neighbor could sign you up for an account, then they wanted payment to delete.

Honey would extract any promo code they could find, then try to make you pay to remove it.

naet

19 hours ago

I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's partly because a couple of large ad companies decided to stop backing podcasts which took a large amount of money out of the ecosystem.

Podcasts are much harder to get analytics on since the ecosystem is made up of a bunch of different podcast platforms and services, and I bet that plays into part of it. You might not be able to tell if people are downloading your podcast (a copy might be cached by a podcast provider), you might not know if people are listening or listening all the way through, if people are skipping over your ad, etc.

Ad marketers love statistics.

rchaud

2 days ago

As a podcast listener, I can think of a few reasons:

- 10-20 companies focused on Direct to Customer (DTC) products seem to make up the majority of advertisers for a lot of podcasts: VPNs, mattresses, personal grooming products, discount code providers, online courses, etc. If their ad budgets are reduced in the current economic climate, podcast earnings will fall. It's also possible that they've collected enough data to know that ROI in this medium isn't great, and growth of podcast creation is slowing.

- A lot of top podcasts have been being acquired by Spotify and Apple as exclusives over the past few years, where a lot of this ad spending was concentrated . This reduces the total pool of advertising money available.

- Programmatic advertising (where ads are spliced into the downloaded file, varying by geographical location) has lowered the cost of advertising, so the money paid out to podcast owners is less.

slumberlust

2 days ago

When Spotify picked up podcasts they could now offer way more information and targeting to the ad buyers. Podcasts they just know if you played their podcast can't compete.

__loam

2 days ago

Something that annoys me about all the AI hype is that it's breaking a bunch of systems that seemed like they were chugging along just fine. Fundamentally all those podcasts probably have the same listeners as before, why is it necessary to totally rethink how we advertise to those people? Seems like we're causing a lot of pain by breaking things to make a bet on something that's totally unproven.

gedy

2 days ago

I don't have a reference handy but I think another factor was Apple (at least) started to exclude the automatic podcast downloads as a "listen", which caused a large drop in podcast listener counts for ad purposes.

lukev

2 days ago

Putting AI in the primary loop for optimizing ads (or anything) is risky... because you can only optimize what you have metrics for. Any implicit or unstated values will go ignored.

There was an article going around a few years ago how if you just "optimized" without any constraints, you'd invariably iterate towards just selling porn.

This feels kind of like that.

ffuxlpff

2 days ago

We are all waiting for plot twist that these actually work better than human made ads and the weirder they get the worse humans can compete with them.

atrus

2 days ago

Honestly? They might. A game I play (Torn.com) started using AI and over dramatic ads, and they outperformed (higher signups, and higher retention) the more traditional and even player created ads.

The owner expressed surprise and frustration over it, because it kinda sucks that's what works.

lawlessone

2 days ago

Could we(AI ads) be hitting this? "Supernormal Stimulus"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

hollerith

2 days ago

Newspapers and cheap gin were already supernormal stimuli 200 years ago.

lawlessone

2 days ago

I think you can add to that things like fast foods, snacks etc with carefully tuned levels of fats , salts, sugars etc to keep people eating.

hollerith

2 days ago

And cheap paperback novels, movies, TV, pornography and video games. The amount of stimulation or positive reward available through these things with only a small effort and a small risk and a short waiting time are much greater than anything available in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness with a similar degree of effort, risk and waiting time.

lawlessone

2 days ago

Not sure if that was an attempt to reduce my argument to an absurdity.. but now we can see many of those things evolve and adapt in real time with lots of testing to reach their maximum potential.

hollerith

a day ago

>an attempt to reduce my argument to an absurdity

Definitely not. I am being sincere.

There is a lot of individual variation in susceptibility to a vice. For example, I never had any significant amount of trouble avoiding any food I believed was bad for me. It just never required much willpower, but it is so easy for me to fall into a habit of overconsumption of video entertainment that I haven't owned a television set in decades (and lichess.org is blocked 3 times in my /etc/hosts: near the top, again near the middle and again near the end of the file).

lawlessone

20 hours ago

>Definitely not. I am being sincere.

haha no worries, i may be insecure and seeing the flaws in my own argument there..

Similar in some ways i've tried things in my 20's that should have got me hooked but never felt the urge to do or seek out those things. Can't watch TV either but computer games on the other hand... absolutely hooked.

redsymbol

2 days ago

Yeah, as someone who spends a lot of money every month buying Meta ads, I had that thought looking at some of the article's examples.

But in its current form, I think that may happen mostly for very direct-response ads, while creating branding problems that would be expensive for many companies in the long run.

Also, some of the AI-generated creatives and copy that Meta has suggested to me actually misleads or flat-out lies about what is being advertised. Which makes me wonder if the American FTC will go after some companies for running misleading ads at some point, if they are not careful about what suggestions they accept (the ad manager UI currently makes it extremely easy to accidentally approve something you shouldn't).

smallmancontrov

2 days ago

Elsagate is back, and this time she's after boomer gold.

doctorpangloss

2 days ago

this plot twist happened years ago.

anyway, the main theory of better ad performance from generated ads isn't about, being weird or whatever. it's that few ads on social media are matching with intent to buy, i.e., they are the opposite of google search ads. so there's a much higher diversity of creatives. like, "saturation", like you see the ad so much, you are psychologically going to choose whatever product it is hawking when it finally comes time for you to buy a thing in the category it belongs to. generative ads are merely delivering ad creative development work that SMBs (40% of Meta's revenue) are too unsophisticated to use.

xthe

2 days ago

That’s a bit risky. When AI starts swapping proven ads, you often end up with more volume but lower quality lots of junk leads. If something is already working, replacing it automatically can hurt real results, not just the metrics.

smallmancontrov

2 days ago

But just think of how much money Meta could make by slopping fetish-bait over your brand and charging you for every click!

copx

2 days ago

Don't give them ideas.

haskellandrust

2 days ago

Proven ads? The dirty not-so-secret is that proven ads don’t exist. That’s why these companies employ PHDs to think of new and interesting ways to modify your behavior and influence your future. This is just another step in that evolution

agumonkey

2 days ago

there will be a chapter some day on the link or limit between human involvement and emotion, and the economic value of something

for 2000 years we removed some hardship to improve everything but everything automated seems like an economic blackhole

design2203

2 days ago

Because there is an obsession re. Financial wealth as opposed to the creation of real wealth.

The two are not the same. The connection between the two has seemingly been lost.

neom

2 days ago

Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcomes as they say. Hyper consumerism, status symbols, a fundamentally pack/tribal species? what could possibly go wrong?

immibis

2 days ago

The way around this, by the way, is to create some kind of alternative exchange system that only admits real-for-real exchange and makes hoarding money impossible.

danaris

a day ago

No; the way around this, as it always has been, is redistribution.

I know it's considered a dirty word in many circles nowadays, but by far the most effective means we know of disincentivizing a singleminded focus on the accumulation of wealth is to make that number something you can't keep pushing up after a certain point.

No human being will ever be genuinely discouraged from making a better product or making themselves better at doing something because they couldn't turn their (personal, not company) $30 million/year into $300 million/year. Because a) at those numbers, the only material difference is the number; your lifestyle won't change appreciably, and b) if you actually cared about making a better product or making yourself better at doing a thing in the first place, that kind of extra money (or lack thereof) wouldn't be important enough to change that.

ben_w

2 days ago

To the main topic: I am so not surprised.

I like GenAI, I use it, but even in the best case I don't want to publish stuff it made without checking the results for weirdness.

As an aside: I find the linked page reloading randomly as I read it, and eventually crashing (iOS, Safari). Anyone else getting this problem?

latexr

2 days ago

> As an aside: I find the linked page reloading randomly as I read it, and eventually crashing (iOS, Safari). Anyone else getting this problem?

Yes, Business Insider and (if I recall) Bloomberg (both shared on HN on occasion) both do that to me.

realitydrift

a day ago

Meta’s “AI ads going rogue” is the Optimization Trap made literal. Once the system can only see measurable metrics, it starts evolving creative toward whatever spikes them. The granny ad is a semantic fidelity collapse in miniature, as brand meaning gets compressed into click through proxies, and the output drifts into uncanny nonsense that can still perform. The scary part is the UX layer quietly re-enabling toggles, because internal incentives reward feature adoption and spend, not advertiser intent or customer trust. You end up paying for a black box feedback loop that generates plausible slop, burns goodwill, and leaves you doing more manual oversight than before.

SunshineTheCat

2 days ago

Ads are one of those things that are pretty much universally hated by every person on the planet and yet companies/platforms continue to find innovative ways to make them more insufferable.

bondarchuk

2 days ago

If they were universally hated it would be easy to outlaw them through democratic means. Yet bring this up to the average person and they'll quickly find 500 reasons why it shouldn't be done. The only reasonable conclusion (sad as it may be) is most people don't actually hate ads.

silisili

2 days ago

I'm always baffled by this. The only exposure I have to video ads at all anymore are the 3 or so football games I might watch per year OTA. Each time, I'm always absolutely blown away by both the amount of and content of the ads and how maddening they are.

I always wonder if people who watch regularly are just used to it as part of life, like some weird advertising Stockholm syndrome.

dylan604

2 days ago

haha, you seem to think laws a democratically created. we should all by now know that most laws are written by others that donate the most to the congress critters that just attach their names to them.

esseph

2 days ago

Everybody hates daylight savings time but we still have it.

54% of people are creeped out by targeted ads, 79% of mobile and 73% of desktop users are "frustrated" by the current ad load, and 70% of customers across the board find digital advertising "annoying and unpleasant".

(I have a self-held theory that roughly 30% of people are... interesting to say the least.)

BenjiWiebe

a day ago

I hate time change but I love daylight savings time.

I'll put up with the switch if that's the only way to get DST.

conradfr

2 days ago

An AI agent watching AI ads and buying groceries for you.

hawtads

2 days ago

It's not just Facebook, the entire ads industry is heading in this direction. There's a seismic change going on right now.

dylan604

2 days ago

So instead of devs needing to retool their skills, the Don Drapers of the world will be ousted instead? I'm thinking I'm okay with this

jkuria

2 days ago

This is really annoying. They force the "Optimize Text Per Person" and it is really hard to turn off. If you accept even one "enhancement" they turn OTPP and there isn't a disable button. And then it spews garbage in some of the ads--copy that is full of non-sequiturs and first and second lines that are complete nonesense. They should be held to account.

redsymbol

2 days ago

Media buyer here (among other things), so I feel you. I think it's possible the American FTC might start going after advertisers at some point, because Meta's generated text can in some cases mislead or flat-out lie about what is actually being sold.

The only defense is to have checklists and continually go over running campaigns to make sure everything is configured properly, which as you note is really hard to turn off. Very easy to miss a detail in ad manager's complex UI.

danaris

a day ago

> I think it's possible the American FTC might start going after advertisers at some point

...not if the Republicans stay in office.

measurablefunc

2 days ago

This is nothing, wait until Zuckerberg delivers those 15 virtual "friends" he promised & they start shilling for whoever is the highest bidder.

agentifysh

2 days ago

are Meta's ad conversions that good as people say it is? anytime this comes up its always advertising on X is the worst and Meta is the best but is this backed up by real data?

it makes sense why X is the worst performing but mystery as to what makes Meta so special.

eastbound

2 days ago

Maybe Meta has older people with more spending power. That’s the lesson of Spinal Tap: Sometimes you don’t know what your success is caused by, and every rationalization makes you optimize the wrong knob (hence the “amp it up to 11” meme).

redsymbol

2 days ago

I have spent over $100k of my own money running ads on Meta, over $10k on Linkedin, and also significant amounts on Google (GDN/Youtube/keyword search) and X/Twitter.

My experience:

For most ad campaign types, YES, Meta works far better than any alternative.

In my view, this is because its underlying machine-learning algorithms are better. Not the generative AI mentioned in the article, but the core ML-based learning strategy that every modern ad platform has been based on for over a decade now, allowing it to learn to find buyers for whatever you are selling. Meta is just better at that than anyone else - far better. And has been for years.

Linkedin is quite interesting and can reach audiences no other ad platform can. The problem with LI is that it is tremendously expensive. Think $50-200 per qualified lead, so it only makes sense for very high ticket offers. I've never been able to make LI ads work for lowticket offers (i.e. under $500 gross margin per sale).

I have attempted to run ads on X/twitter several times in the past 5 years, and each time gave up because of how terribly it performed. Literally zero sales from the ad spend, using the exact same ads which worked great on Meta. X is kind of infamous among media buyers for how bad it is. But I haven't tried it in over 8 months, so maybe it has gotten better now. Grok/xAI is quite good, so I am not sure why they haven't made the X ad platform a priority. If they did, I bet they could eat Meta's lunch.

Google is really 3 ad platforms: Youtube, Google Display Network (GDN), and keyword search. These are all radically different in many dimensions; the only thing they have in common is that Google lets you set them all up through the same web interface.

Mostly I run ads selling mid to high-ticket stuff to sophisticated buyers, and I think most of those people have Youtube Premium, which makes YT ad-free. So I haven't tried running ads on Youtube much. My media buyer colleagues who are into it are mostly selling mass-market offers that most people on HN would consider kind of scummy. They tell me it can work well, but requires a lot of ad spend over weeks to start working. In contrast, I can often get a Meta ad campaign profitable within 48 hours.

Keyword search works great, but only for "bottom of funnel" buyers (i.e. people who are actively looking for a solution they can pay for right now). There are only so many of those, so generally you cannot scale up ad spend (and thus absolute profit) very high. In contrast, Meta can create new "top of funnel" buyers, which is a larger audience by many orders of magnitude, which allows you to ramp up some Meta campaigns to a very high level of profitable ad spend.

GDN has been tricky for me. I think it has a lot of potential, but it has a very different model, and so far I have not been able to make it profitable for my offers. It certainly seems easier to set up a successful campaign with Meta.

Short answer to your question: Yes, even with the things the article is justifiably griping about, Meta is just way, way better than any alternative right now.

agentifysh

a day ago

Thank you wow what a refreshing take. I've also the same about X, it echos my personal experience in that, I can't recall a single time I clicked on an ad intentionally or paid more than a second. They don't even register for me which is a contrast to Youtube/Instagram where I do pay more attention.

Is it possible to start small with Meta and then ramp up? Any principles to adhere to increase probability of success?

redsymbol

a day ago

> Is it possible to start small with Meta and then ramp up?

It depends. What kind of offer are you selling?

Generally the learning curve is massive, long, stressful and expensive. I lost tens of thousands of dollars before I could consistently make ads which were profitable.

It's not like learning coding. Imagine if every time you saw a stack trace, $250 was deducted from your bank account. Learning media buying is kind of like that.

Another path is to get hired by an ad agency. They will train you and give you a budget to manage; if you lose that budget, the worst that can happen is they'll fire you (rather than losing all your stuff).

But that would be a switch in career path, which I do not think you are asking about.

agentifysh

a day ago

just a mobile app i been working on figured i might try my luck with meta

what is the source for that uphill curve is that because its not clear what your user wants or optimizing ad copies ?

im definitely not looking to spend thousands of dollars, figured starting out small hmmm

getting hired by ad agency seems interesting reminds me of trading desks a bit

redsymbol

a day ago

I would not proceed unless you are willing to invest $50/day for a minimum of 6 months.

There is also the investment in learning, which would require 5-10 hours per week that whole time.

I say this because anything short of that is likely to lose money and accomplish little.

Not trying to gatekeep, so feel free to try it however you like. Maybe it is worth you trying to set up one ad just to see if you like the process enough to continue.

agentifysh

20 hours ago

thanks for the heads up i dont think you are gate keeping at all

do you have any recommendation for an alternative? seems like for now i am going to defer the Meta ad experiment , was thinking of targeting TikTok videos

redsymbol

15 hours ago

Unfortunately, just changing ad platforms is no magic bullet. Tiktok advertising is no easier to ramp up on, in fact it will probably be more difficult and expensive.

If are worried about the significant expense and high risk of paid ads, which is very reasonable, I recommend you do not do paid ads at all.

I think a better alternative for you is to learn to create organic content, e.g. videos for IG and tiktok, or text posts for platforms like X. And learn to stimulate sales of your app that way.

This also has a long learning curve, but dodges the financial risk of paid ads. Once your organic content is dialed in enough to make consistent profit, you'll be much better positioned to start with ads and be successful.

Good luck!

imiric

2 days ago

The tech ouroboros manifest.

garganzol

2 days ago

Pretty much what Google did back in 2021 or so - all the ads suddenly became "adaptive" - meaning that they started to produce funky texts trying to lure the unassuming viewers. Needless to say that those generated texts sometimes were unprofessional / borderline ignorant. The worst thing is the impossibility to turn that junk generation off.

It was the last time I seriously considered Google Ads because loosing control over sensitive narratives is more than uninspiring; it kills most of the benefits of advertisement for an advertiser.

tehjoker

2 days ago

this might be a submarine advertisement. someone is pitching their startup near the bottom of the article

jasonlotito

2 days ago

Submarine? It says Advertising at the top.

smallerize

2 days ago

That's just the category of news this is. It doesn't mean it's an ad.

alex1138

2 days ago

I apologize for the somewhat low-effort comment but across the board Meta is the single most malicious tech company I can think of

I'm no fan of Google but at least Google didn't use your 2FA for ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16378888, or for example you can actually contact people via gmail https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

It's why a CEO being on record as saying "dumb fucks" matters, joking or not. And I don't think he was joking or else "trying to make a point". He does not care about you. When people show you who they are believe them

nmfisher

a day ago

For what it’s worth, I unequivocally agree with you.

But if you spent any time with the older generation over the holiday break, it’s immediately obvious why it makes no difference. They sit there and scroll Facebook and Instagram advertising slop for multiple hours literally every single day.

Facebook will keep hoovering up cash until at least that generation dies off (and possibly the one after that too).

alex1138

a day ago

Oh sure but a) people don't realize the scandals or magnitude of them and b) they literally captured every network effect

Myspace was a hot mess but they got everyone that was there at the start of the internet where if I'm on it, you join, because you're on it Alice joins and Bob then follows

Facebook has rigged the game by forcing everyone there using very underhanded tactics and the internet is still young so they're able to succeed in doing so

EA-3167

2 days ago

I think that's nice! Now my ad-blocker and their ad-generator can have a loving relationship without me being involved. The circle is complete!

Seriously though, every bit of ad-tech news I've heard for the last decade explains why even my 70 year old mother knows what an ad-blocker is and uses it religiously. Meanwhile paywalls are popping up everywhere and you know... I prefer them to ads; they were always used as a bogeyman by ad-tech bros, but truly they're not bad at all. For one thing a paywall really helps you to stop and think how much you care about a site.