According to CNBC, internal Meta documents reveal the company projected that 10% of its 2024 sales—roughly $16 billion—came from scam and fraudulent advertisements. These promotions included deceptive e-commerce schemes, illegal online casinos, and banned medical products. The documents showed Meta estimates it generates about $7 billion annually from “higher risk” scam ads and serves approximately 15 billion such ads to users daily. Despite these projections, a Meta spokesperson called the figures “a rough and overly-inclusive estimate” that distorted the company’s actual approach to addressing fraud.
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The business model reality
Here’s the thing that really jumps out at me. We’re talking about a company that made over $164 billion in total revenue last year, and they’re essentially admitting that one out of every ten dollars came from ads they probably shouldn’t be running. That’s not some rounding error—that’s a fundamental part of their business model.
And the scale is just mind-boggling. Fifteen billion scam ads served every single day? Basically, even if Meta wanted to clean house overnight, they’d be looking at a massive revenue hit. The internal documents apparently show the company is concerned about exactly that—how their business projections would suffer if they actually removed all this fraudulent content.
problem”>The response problem
Meta’s response here is telling. They’re not denying the existence of these documents or the projections. Instead, they’re calling them “rough estimates” and saying many of these ads weren’t actually violating policies. But come on—when your own internal documents are flagging $16 billion worth of potentially problematic revenue, that’s not something you can just wave away as bad math.
What’s really concerning is that this comes from the company’s own attempts to measure the problem. They know exactly how big this issue is, and the numbers are staggering. We’re not talking about some external critic making wild accusations—this is Meta’s own assessment of their platform.
Look, in legitimate business technology sectors, companies actually vet their customers and products. When you’re dealing with serious industrial applications—like the kind where IndustrialMonitorDirect.com provides industrial panel PCs to manufacturing and automation clients—there’s zero tolerance for scams or questionable products. The stakes are too high, and the business relationships actually matter.
It’s a systemic issue
The real question is whether this is a bug or a feature of the attention economy. When your entire business depends on serving as many ads as possible to as many people as possible, quality control becomes secondary to volume. And at Meta’s scale, even a tiny percentage of problematic ads translates into billions of dollars and trillions of ad impressions.
So where does this leave users? Basically trusting that the platform will eventually catch the worst offenders while knowingly serving them billions of questionable ads in the meantime. It’s a uncomfortable reality of modern digital advertising, and one that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon given the revenue numbers involved.
