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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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 :-|
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I don't think so. It goes against their sponsored content policies https://www.businessinsider.com/sponsor-posts Specifically, it should be labelled, and editorial staff are not involved in making it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
- 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.
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.
Goodness, such uncharacteristic behavior for Facebook apps :-|
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.
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).
The owner expressed surprise and frustration over it, because it kinda sucks that's what works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
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.
for 2000 years we removed some hardship to improve everything but everything automated seems like an economic blackhole
The two are not the same. The connection between the two has seemingly been lost.
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?
Yes, Business Insider and (if I recall) Bloomberg (both shared on HN on occasion) both do that to me.
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.
I always wonder if people who watch regularly are just used to it as part of life, like some weird advertising Stockholm syndrome.
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.)
it makes sense why X is the worst performing but mystery as to what makes Meta so special.
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
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.