Advertisers Worry Facebook May Become X
Advertising big wigs say they may flee Meta platforms if their brands appear next to toxic content. But where else would they go?

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Meta may have had an audience of one in mind when it changed its content moderation policies last week, but the move could alienate a crowd it’s typically cared about a whole lot more: advertisers.
Just ask bigwigs in the advertising industry, who told the Financial Times in a feature published this weekend they fear seeing their brands on Meta platforms appearing next to toxic content, such as hate speech or disinformation, and are considering fleeing the platform. But where are the safe — and lucrative — havens for advertisers to turn to?
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Men World
Meta wants its content moderation policies to look a lot more like those of X-née-Twitter, which is owned and operated by Donald Trump megadonor Elon Musk and has replaced professional fact checkers with a “community notes” feature and offers a relatively higher level of tolerance for posts featuring controversial content. Advertisers, of course, have fled X en masse. But X has a relatively meager and seemingly shrinking user base (around 318 million monthly users, per SensorTower) compared with Meta’s Facebook (3 billion MAUs) and Instagram (2 billion MAUs).
Which means Meta is essentially betting that advertisers simply can’t walk away from the global network effects of its ginormous user base. And by the way, likely helping matters is the reality that good digital advertising real estate may soon be harder to come by:
- Only Google rivals Meta’s reach in the gargantuan digital advertising world, which PricewaterhouseCoopers projects to become a $1 trillion market within years. Meta did around $132 billion in ad revenue in 2023, and is on track to surpass it in fiscal-year 2024 (it reports its fourth-quarter earnings at the end of the month).
- Meanwhile, rival platform TikTok’s potential ban is looking likelier after a rocky day for the platform at the US Supreme Court, which means its roughly $11 billion in annual US ad revenue could be up for grabs. Much of that ad content is well-suited to Instagram as well, which last year made up over half of Meta’s ad revenue, according to a report from eMarketer; Instagram’s upbeat lifestyle content is less likely to be affected by Meta’s policy changes as well.
Unsupported: If there’s one place ads aren’t showing up that much, it’s on streaming TV. Streamers generally see cheaper ad-supported tiers as a growth machine that will generate more revenue per user than premium ad-free subscription tiers. But so far, they aren’t selling that many ads, according to a recent analysis from Sherwood News. Seems like yet another reason to quit cable, where seemingly half the air time feels like advertisements these days.