Meta is expected to earn $240 billion from advertising this year, growing over 22.3% year-over-year and outpacing global social-media ad growth, according to a new forecasting report
from WARC Media.
In 2025, Meta’s ad business grew 22%, reaching $196 billion in revenue. For 2026, WARC
forecasts a slightly higher growth rate, which the media company anticipates will dip down to 12% in 2027.
As Meta showed in its most recent quarterly earnings
report, the tech giant has used its massive investment in artificial intelligence (AI) to build out its advertising business, offering ad partners a range of AI-powered tools that helped
boost ad impressions by 19% year-over-year in Q1, with average ad prices increasing 12%.
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“Meta’s flywheel is spinning faster than ever,”
writes Alex Brownsell, head of content at WARC. “The company’s AI-driven automation is transforming how brands connect with audiences, driving rapid growth in advertising spend with
Facebook and Instagram.”
By planning to spend up to $600 billion on AI development through 2028,
Meta is primarily focused on optimizing monetization efficiency rather than increasing overall ad load, WARC notes.
These ongoing investments in AI technologies have led to brands seeing a 41% higher blended return on ad spend and 17% lower new customer acquisition cost compared to those running manual
campaigns, according to analysis by Fospha.
Furthermore, Meta’s Partnership Ads offering has impacted
the ways brands utilize creators, with 71% of consumers now making purchases within days of seeing a creator’s content across Meta’s family of apps.
According to WARC’s report, Facebook alone will account for 60% of Meta’s ad revenue this year, compared to 40% for
Instagram.
Despite Meta’s ongoing success with its advertising business, Brownsell notes that “investors appear concerned that the flywheel is at risk
of spinning out of control, in light of plateauing user growth and mounting pressure to better monetize existing audiences.”
This previous quarter,
Meta reported 3.56 billion users across its family of digital platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Meta AI — marking a slight decline from the 3.58 billion DAUs
the company reported in fourth-quarter 2025.
